abolitionmedia

2025-12-11 05:50:34

Gaza’s Smoke Clouds the West Bank’s Flames: The Colonial Project Made Permanent

On the morning of 7 October 2023, while the world braced for the fallout of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, another front of war opened quietly. Not with airstrikes or artillery, but with bulldozers, laws, and settler militias.

As the bombs pulverized Gaza, the occupied West Bank ignited in a different fire: one of systematic expulsion, violent dispossession, and legal annexation.

The settler state advances

This war does not light up news headlines or trend on social media – unless one follows these developments. But its consequences may prove even more lasting. Under the cover of Gaza’s devastation, Israel has accelerated a long-planned campaign to forcibly dismember the occupied West Bank, destroy Palestinian agricultural life, and erase any prospect of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Its instruments are both brutal and bureaucratic, and include armed settlers, water theft, archaeological decrees, economic strangulation, and the political neutering of what is left of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Settler violence becomes state doctrine

Settler attacks on Palestinians are no longer random or rogue. Once attributed to fringe factions like the “Hilltop Youth,” this violence has, since 7 October, transformed into a semi-official paramilitary extension of the Israeli state. Armed settler mobs now operate in full coordination with the occupation army, acting as enforcers of a policy of forced displacement.

In Areas B and C of the occupied West Bank, Palestinian farmers and villagers have been hunted by these militias who break into homes, destroy solar panels, poison water tanks, and torch crops – not just to intimidate, but to injure, kill, and drive people off their land.

These attacks reflect a strategic shift. According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 260 settler assaults were recorded in October alone –the highest number since 2006. These assaults, averaging eight per day, are systematic, disproportionately targeting farmers during harvest season and shepherd communities in remote areas.

The real weapon, however, is impunity. Settlers now act with full confidence that the state will protect them, not prosecute them. In one case, settlers torched a mosque in Deir Istiya and graffitied its walls with a defiant message: “We are not afraid of Avi Bluth,” referring to the Israeli army’s Central Command chief. Backed by extremist ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, they feel – and function – as the true sovereigns of the land.

Israeli rights group Yesh Din reports that even before the war, 94 percent of settler violence cases ended without indictment. Since the war began, even the appearance of legal process has evaporated.

Criminalizing olive trees

In the occupied West Bank, Israel’s war extends to the roots – literally. The olive tree, lifeblood of rural Palestinian society and economy, is now a frontline target. Tel Aviv has weaponized resource control and environmental laws to dismantle Palestinian agriculture and detach people from their land.

Palestinian farmers, according to Amnesty International, are subjected to a regime of domination that severely restricts access to vital resources. Israel controls 85 percent of the occupied West Bank’s water and bans the digging of wells, forcing many to rely on traditional rain-fed agriculture – a practice rendered unstable by climate change and groundwater theft for the benefit of nearby, lush settler colonies.

This war on agriculture is also waged through Kafkaesque legalities. Israel has criminalized the harvesting of native Palestinian plants like thyme, akkoub, and sage, citing “nature protection” laws. While bulldozers raze thousands of dunams of wild flora to expand settlements, Palestinians gathering akkoub for a family meal are fined and jailed. Experts argue this is part of a broader campaign to sever Palestinians from their land, even controlling what they eat and how they live.

Meanwhile, settlers launch direct assaults on crops, block Palestinian farmers’ access to hundreds of hectares of olive groves, and cripple the local economy. When Palestinians resist, they are charged with terrorism. The goal is to make staying on the land too dangerous, too expensive, and ultimately impossible.

‘Creeping’ or open annexation?

Alongside violence, Israel is pushing a quieter, perhaps more dangerous campaign: the legal absorption of the occupied West Bank into the settler state. This creeping annexation does not rely on declarations or ceremonies. It operates through zoning laws, civilian governance, and strategic archaeology.

One of the most alarming manifestations of this shift is the weaponization of archaeology. The Israeli government seeks to place the occupied West Bank under the authority of its “Israel Antiquities Authority,” stripping jurisdiction from the military administration and handing it to a civilian body – a de facto annexation.

Under the pretext of preserving “biblical heritage,” vast areas are declared “archaeological sites” or “national parks,” creating an exclusively Jewish narrative that automatically bars Palestinians from building or farming on these lands.

This historical fabrication erases the region’s multi-layered past in favor of a singular Jewish mythos designed to justify colonization.

By replacing military rule with civilian law, Israel is reclassifying the occupied West Bank not as occupied territory, but as a sovereign extension. The lines between Tel Aviv and Tulkarem blur, and apartheid becomes formalized.

Dismantling the political center

As bulldozers dig up fields and laws suffocate villages, Tel Aviv is also re-engineering Palestinian political life. The goal is not to dismantle the collaborative PA outright – it still serves an administrative and security function in Area A – but to reduce it to a neutered municipal subcontractor.

Israel is bypassing the PA altogether, striking direct relationships with tribal leaders, village councils, and local power brokers. This is a classic colonial policy of dividing the indigenous polity, elevating local collaborators, and eliminating the possibility of unified national leadership.

This aims to fracture Palestinian cohesion and recast the cause from a national liberation struggle into isolated humanitarian cases – villages like Hebron, Nablus, and Jenin presented as disconnected communities in need of charity.

In parallel, Tel Aviv is choking the PA financially by siphoning off its tax revenues, as permitted under the Oslo Accords. As the “Authority” collapses into dysfunction, the resulting chaos is used to justify further Israeli control.

The new Nakba

The sum of these parts – settler militias, scorched agriculture, illegal land grabs, and political fragmentation – is a campaign of forcible displacement without tanks. In short, it is a silent Nakba (catastrophe).

A B’Tselem report confirms that settler violence alone has displaced 44 Palestinian shepherding communities since the war began. As Yair Dvir from the organization explains: “When you look at what’s happening, there’s an entire system in place. These are not just rogue settlers. They are backed by the Israeli establishment. The goal is clear: forced Palestinian displacement.”

While Gaza’s destruction captures the cameras, the occupied West Bank is being methodically emptied through fear, poverty, and thirst. Israel’s strategic objective is to eliminate the two-state framework and enshrine a one-state reality in which full rights are reserved for Jews, while Palestinians are confined to disconnected enclaves, stripped of sovereignty, and eventually pushed toward the east bank of the Jordan River.

To speak of a “day after” in Gaza without reckoning with what is being cemented in the hills of the occupied West Bank is to miss the heart of the project. The warplanes may go quiet, but the machinery of colonization – the fences, permits, laws, roads, and guns – grinds on. It is here, in the silence, that the erasure is completed. A future where return is denied, justice outlawed, and history repaved with concrete and myth.

source: The Cradle

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#alAqsaFlood #gaza #palestine #repression #resistance #westAsia

Data Sheet: Law Enforcement on Israeli Civilians in the West Bank (Settler Violence), 2005-2024 - Yesh Din

Two decades of monitoring investigations into settler violence leaves no room for doubt: Israel breaches its obligation to protect Palestinians

^{yshdin (Yesh Din)}

abolitionmedia

2025-12-11 05:21:52

Operation Condor: Transnational Murder Syndicate

On November 25th, 1975, the 60th birthday of Chile’s CIA-installed dictator General Augusto Pinochet, high-ranking representatives of the repressive secret police forces of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay gathered in Santiago for a covert three-day summit. There, the quintet of US-sponsored Latin American fascist juntas forged an incendiary agreement. Dubbed ‘Operation Condor’ after Chile’s national bird, over the next eight years the endeavour blazed a gruesome trail of repression, torture, and murder throughout the hemisphere and beyond.

Declassified records of the summit contain little trace of the horror that was to come. They primarily outline the establishment of regular meetings between the oppressive agencies, formal and routine exchange of information, and the creation of a shared database “on people and organizations linked to subversion” in the region – in particular, individuals and entities “directly or indirectly linked to Marxism.” The only hint of belligerence is a brief snippet on the Operation being concerned with “attacking subversion related to our countries.”

Within months, Condor evolved into a transnational death squad nexus, with “subversives” the world over marked for execution. Of particular focus was the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR), an exile coalition of left-wing Latin American revolutionaries opposing the governments behind the Operation – which by 1976 also included Brazil. That July, a Condor meeting was convened, about which US intelligence learned. It was planned to insert operatives into Paris, where JCR was headquartered, to conduct intelligence gathering and ultimately, assassinations. A heavily redacted contemporary CIA memo noted:

“The basic mission of ‘Condor’ teams being sent to operate in France would be to liquidate top-level [JCR] leaders…Chile has ‘many’ (unidentified) targets in Europe…The Uruguayans also are considering targets…such as…opposition politician Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, if he should ever travel to Europe. Some leaders of Amnesty International might be selected for the target list.”

While the CIA installed all Condor’s constituent governments via military coups invariably involving mass disappearances and slaughter of political opponents, the Agency was extremely anxious about its Latin American proxies conducting “offensive action outside their own jurisdictions,” as a late July 1976 CIA memo recorded. Not least because it raised the prospect of the Agency being “wrongfully accused” of responsibility for “this type of activity.” The State Department was also intensely worried about the Operation’s extraordinarily broad range of targets.

‘Growing Problems’

A briefing dispatched to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in August 1976 recorded how Condor’s members “see themselves as embattled” by phantom Marxist adversaries at home and abroad. “Despite near decimation of the Marxist left in Chile and Uruguay, along with accelerating progress toward that goal in Argentina,” the juntas were possessed of a “siege mentality shading into paranoia.” This was enhanced by “suspicion…the US has ‘lost its will’ to stand firm against Communism because of Vietnam,” and détente with the Soviet Union. As such:

“Fighting the absent pinkos remains a central goal of national security…Some ‘mistakes’ are made by the torturers, who have difficulty finding logical victims. Murder squads kill harmless people and petty thieves.”

In response to this illusory threat, pursuit of perceived “subversives” became absolutely central to the domestic and foreign policy of Condor governments. However, the State Department fretted how this crusade “increasingly translates into” vicious oppression of “non-violent dissent from the left and center left.” More generally, “subversion” was “never the most precise of terms.” In the Latin American context, the categorisation “has grown to include nearly anyone who opposes government policy.”

Resultantly, “there is a chance of persecution by foreign police acting on indirect, unknown information.” The memo recorded how “numerous Uruguayan refugees have been murdered in Argentina,” with “widespread” and “credible” accusations Buenos Aires was “doing their Uruguayan colleagues a favor,” and a high risk the victims were just average citizens, not engaged in political activism, let alone insurrectionary violence. Concurrently, many officials in Condor countries spoke of fighting a “Third World War” against Communism globally.

The utility of this narrative was clear. “It justifies harsh and sweeping “wartime” measures,” the State Department observed, while “[emphasising] the international and institutional aspect, thereby justifying the exercise of power beyond national borders.” Moreover, for the juntas involved in Operation Condor, “it is important to their ego, their salaries, and their equipment budgets to believe in a Third World War.” This shared self-interest was encouraging regional military governments to “[band] together in what may well become a political bloc of some cohesiveness.”

The State Department believed “the broader implications” of this development “for us and for future trends in the hemisphere” were “disturbing”, creating “a range of growing problems.” For one, Condor was damaging to the US from a public relations perspective, as “internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys.” Washington was “especially identified with Chile,” so the country serving as the Operation’s nucleus “cannot do us any good.” It was noted how Europeans “hate Pinochet & Co. with a passion that rubs off on us.”

Chile’s “black-sheep status” had “already made trouble for its economic recovery” due to overseas boycotts and countries refusing to trade with Santiago. “Human rights abuses” committed by Pinochet and his allies were constantly “creating more and more problems of conscience, law, and diplomacy.” Most gravely, “the use of bloody counterterrorism by these regimes threatens their increasing isolation from the West and the opening of deep ideological divisions among the countries of the hemisphere.” There was a significant risk of other regional governments following their lead.

Challenging this state of affairs was predicted to be problematic, given Condor members were wholly unrepentant about their reign of carnage. “They consider their counter-terrorism every bit as justified as Israeli actions against Palestinian terrorists and believe that the criticism from democracies of their war on terrorism reflects a double standard,” the State Department lamented. Nonetheless, a demarche was duly drafted, warning Condor countries of the “adverse effect” of their assassination program being publicly exposed. It was never delivered.

‘Inside Intelligence’

Orlando Letelier was one of the closest confidantes of Chilean President Salvador Allende, overthrown by Pinochet with CIA assistance in September 1973. Accordingly, he was among the first former state officials arrested by Santiago’s military government post-coup. Held in a number of concentration camps for political prisoners and tortured every step of the way, he was finally freed due to US diplomatic pressure after 12 months. Upon Letelier’s release, he was informed that DINA, the junta’s secret police force, “has long arms”. His tormentors added:

“General Pinochet will not and does not tolerate activities against his government… [punishment can be delivered] no matter where the violator lives.”

Having relocated to the US, and despite fearing for his life, Letelier immediately began organising exile opposition to Pinochet’s rule, while publicising the junta’s sadistic treatment of dissidents and opponents. His campaigning compelled several governments to sever economic ties with Chile, and refuse the country loans. These activities placed him squarely in Condor’s crosshairs. On September 21st 1976, while driving to work, Letelier was assassinated via car bomb. It was the first known act of state-sponsored terrorism to ever take place in Washington DC.

Letelier’s murder prompted a frenzy of media attention, widespread international outcry, and an FBI probe spanning multiple continents. In April 1978, Chile agreed to extradite US-born DINA agent Michael Townley, identified as the key point-person on Letelier’s slaying, Stateside. He struck a deal with prosecutors, receiving a light prison sentence and witness protection in return for offering extensive insight into how the attack was planned and executed. Townley implicated DINA chief Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza as the assassination’s ultimate architects.

In a confession note authored by Townley, he detailed how “explicit orders” were given “to locate Letelier’s residence and workplace,” and meet with the CIA-created Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations to concoct a scheme to “eliminate him” using the nerve agent sarin, “or by another hit-and-run, another accident, or ultimately by any method.” Pinochet’s government “wanted Letelier dead” by hook or by crook. Curiously, Townley also revealed Paraguayan officials told him if he “needed help” in the US, he should contact then-CIA chief Vernon Walter.

Documents unearthed by veteran journalist John Dinges suggest the CIA “had inside intelligence” about Condor assassination plans in the US, “at least two months before Letelier was killed” – “but failed to act.” Moreover, State Department cables released in 2010 indicated Henry Kissinger cancelled the dispatch of a warning against carrying out killings overseas due to be sent to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, five days before Letelier’s murder. There are ample indications this was no coincidence.

In September 1978, Washington demanded the extradition of DINA officials fingered by Townley to stand trial. Following an intimidatory bombing spree targeting Chile’s judiciary, Santiago refused the order. Pinochet was further encouraged by Kissinger subsequently meeting with Chilean Foreign Minister Hernan Cubillos. He dubbed President Jimmy Carter’s behaviour towards Santiago a “disgrace”, declared the extradition order’s rejection “correct”, and advocated treating Carter’s administration “with brutality.” Kissinger forecast the next US President would be a Republican, and restore relations with Chile.

So it was Ronald Reagan won the 1980 Presidential election. Chilean soldiers celebrated his victory by publicly dancing in the streets of Santiago. Condor ended after the fall of Argentina’s junta in late 1983. Still, death squad operations in Latin America targeting “subversives” only ratcheted thereafter, under CIA management. Today, we are left to ponder whether Operation Condor represented the Agency inadvertently creating a monster it couldn’t control, or was the deliberate, desired product of concerted clandestine CIA strategy, acting with Washington’s tacit approval.

Kit Klarenberg
Source: Al Mayadeen

abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=…

#cia #imperialism #operationCondor #repression #usImperialism

Revolution under siege: Reagan’s dirty war on Nicaragua - Freedom Socialist Party

As both Americans and Nicaraguans prepare for presidential elections, 15,000 U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries are poised along the borders of Honduras

^{Freedom Socialist Party}

abolitionmedia

2025-12-11 05:23:51

Brief Statement About the Insurrection in Indonesia and the Subsequent Repression

The following statement by Palang Hitam / ABC Indonesia was broadcast on air Monday, December 9th / between 11am – 1pm CET on Radio Blackout. The name of the show is “bello come una prigione che brucia” (Beautiful as a Burning Prison), a show broadcast since 20 years against prisons, repression, surveillance, military tech and AI. Radio Blackout is an autonomous radio (FM in Turin, Italy, and streaming elsewhere) born in 1992 as common project self managed by local squats, social centers and various collectives and individuals (antifa, anti authoritarian, anticapitalist, anti lots of things, with comrades from different areas of anarchism and communism).

From August to early September 2025, Indonesia was hit by demonstrations and riots triggered by public anger over government policies that were considered detrimental to the people. The main triggers of these protests were drastic increases in the cost of living, including food prices and education costs, as well as mass layoffs that affected many workers. In addition, increases in land and building taxes imposed by local governments as a result of funding cuts from the central government further exacerbated the situation. Public frustration peaked when there were proposals to increase the allowances and salaries of members of the House of Representatives (DPR) which seemed to ignore the suffering of the people.

Initially, public anger was only expressed on social media with calls to dissolve the House of Representatives. However, the response from members of the House of Representatives, especially Ahmad Sahroni, who called the critics “the dumbest people in the world,” only worsened the situation. On August 25, the anger erupted in the form of a massive demonstration in front of the House of Representatives office, which ended in chaos with clashes between demonstrators and the police.

This first demonstration was attended by various elements of society, such as online motorcycle taxi drivers, vocational school students, and members of the general public who were not affiliated with any particular organization. Although the posters they made were ridiculed by some pro-democracy activists for being poorly designed and therefore likely to have been “made by intelligence agents,” the protests continued. Their demands focused on the elimination of allowances for members of the House of Representatives, which were considered too wasteful, the passing of the Asset Seizure Bill, and the rejection of a number of other controversial bills.

On August 26-27, demonstrations continued despite a decline in the number of participants. Many students began to hold open discussions, showing that the issue of the House of Representatives was gaining public attention. However, riots broke out again on August 28, when labor demonstrations in various major cities demanded an increase in the minimum wage, the abolition of the outsourcing system, and changes to the Manpower Act. In Jakarta, labor protests in front of the House of Representatives building and the State Palace ended in riots, which escalated after an online motorcycle taxi driver named Affan Kurniawan was killed when he was hit by an armored police vehicle in Pejompongan, Central Jakarta. This incident was captured on video and went viral, sparking further outrage.

Since early August 29, online motorcycle taxi drivers have gathered at the Kwitang Mobile Brigade Headquarters, demanding justice for Affan’s death and holding the police accountable for the violence against demonstrators. The crowd grew, including students, and the demonstration shifted to police stations and government buildings. However, despite negotiations, the crowd was dissatisfied with the results, and riots broke out again, causing public transportation to come to a standstill and several stations to close.

The riots spread to various major cities outside Jakarta. There were 34 other flashpoints outside Jakarta where public facilities, police stations, and local council buildings were set on fire by the mob. On August 30-31, tensions escalated after it was revealed that several members of the House of Representatives, including Ahmad Sahroni, were abroad. This news further fueled public anger, which led to the storming of the homes of Sahroni and several other members of the House of Representatives, as well as government officials such as Finance Minister Sri Mulyani. Their homes were looted by a crowd that could no longer contain their anger.

That night, the power went out around the Mobile Brigade Headquarters, and police forces deployed to control the riots used tear gas and gunfire to disperse the crowd. The armed forces and police conducted sweeps in various areas to crack down on the rioters. This crackdown continued in the following days, causing tensions to rise throughout Indonesia. The Indonesian government labeled the demonstrators with accusations ranging from terrorism to treason. Instead of meeting the demands during the demonstrations, the Indonesian government responded with continued repression and a retreat from democratization.

This popular uprising was essentially driven by ordinary people, particularly high school students, the unemployed, and the online motorcycle taxi community—forces that had been underestimated and considered “politically unaware” by middle-class activists and most leftists. These rebels are not people who act based on their reading of Marxist or anarchist books. They are on the streets because the information circulating on social media has provoked their anger; anger that is then moderated by the middle class shouting “don’t destroy public facilities,” “don’t be anarchists,” “don’t be provoked,” and finally: making a series of long-winded demands called “17+8” on September 1 just to extinguish the fire and anger (the demands “17+8” that have never been realized until today). It is true that the mob still lack practical intelligence. But of course that is not their fault. Since they are the people who have always been sacrificed by the state and even by the opposition elites who claim to be “revolutionaries”—they have grown up with the understanding that anger must find an outlet.

Then, when the fires stopped burning everywhere, when the rulers and political elites apologized in public, no one could say for sure how it all began. There had been a lot of consolidation, discussion, cross-ideological networking, political campaigns, etc.; but what happened in August 2025 was a festival of insurrection that no one could have predicted. Even when the demonstrations first began, until the death of Affan Kurniawan as the boiling point of public anger, these demonstrations were still seen as “staged demonstrations” for the benefit of those in power, which, ironically, were promoted massively by most middle-class pro-democracy activists and their followers.

Now, after the riots, the police have arrested many people, including anarchists egoist/nihilists, but most of them are victims of wrongful arrest who did not even participate in the demonstrations. They are accused of being masterminds, provocateurs, intellectual actors, and are labeled as “groups of chaos stars.” Meanwhile, the members of DPR such as Ahmad Sahroni, who sparked public outrage, remain in office and have not been dismissed. Recently, the DPR passed a revision to the Criminal Procedure Code that allows police officers to arrest people without evidence and to secretly wiretap, record, and tamper with digital devices.

Palang Hitam / ABC Indonesia

source: Dark Nights

abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=…

#anarchism #asia #indonesia #insurrectionaryAnarchism #repression

Brief statement about the insurrection in Indonesia and the subsequent repression – Dark Nights

Brief statement about the insurrection in Indonesia and the subsequent repression

^{darknights (Dark Nights)}

the saviour

2025-12-11 05:58:32

"what if bambi sleep took over your personality and started killing people on the street" man this movie is crazy

Lety Does Stuff

2025-12-10 21:32:36

@samueljohnson I meant amount!

Spicy is often used to describe horniness, I do sex work and have my photos called “spicy” to no end.

Spicy has also come to describe parts of the Autism Spectrum through popular usage of terms like “neurospicy”.

Spicy is also used to describe things that are heavily seasoned, like lots of Indian cuisine.

There truly is an uncountable amount of ways to use spicy that I left out, largely due to the nature of casual responses on social media lol

I think we have a disconnect here around what kind of language we're referring to. That's probably on me for not better defining the parameters of discourse.

I'm talking about common, “basic terms”. Words that are widely used and cognitively salient, often acquired from a young age.

As another example, in English, most kids define the colors of the rainbow as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Some kids might be aware of indigo and violet, through mnemonics like Roy G Biv, but in my experience, most children lump those two into the common term, purple.

In contrast, Liberian kids speaking Bassa would define the colors of the rainbow as ziza and hui. Ziza defines all warm colors, and hui defines all cool colors. Those are the only common terms for color in Bassa.

That's not all the colors they perceive, obviously the eyes of Liberians function quite similarly to the eyes of Westerners. And that's not all the colors they can describe, they'd simply say some equivalent of “leaf hui” to describe what we call green or “blood ziza” to describe what we call red.

However, those compound words are “non-basic terms”. Similar to piquant in English, it's not a term you learn early on as a child. It's descriptive, higher-level language to refine a basic understanding of the world around us.

Through the usage of relatively advanced and compound words, the entire human experience can be described in just about every language on this planet. However, certain descriptions will carry a higher cognitive cost in some languages versus others.

The higher cognitive cost necessary to describe and parse the difference between capsaicinoid spicy and isothiocyanate spicy is what I'm referring to by “limitation of the English language”.