Solidarity 594, 26 May 2021

Does the AstraZeneca vaccine (AZV) cause rare and dangerous types of blood clot? Probably yes, and AZV is now not recommended for people under 30. Let’s look at the overall picture. Out of 4.4 million people confirmed to have Covid-19, over 150,000 have died. That’s about 34,000 per million confirmed cases. Confirmed cases are likely to be an underestimate of actual cases but, taking the highest estimate, the fatality rate is still at least 10,000 per million cases or about 1%. In principle, mass vaccination should eventually be able to reduce Covid infection rates, and therefore deaths, to...

Fifteen or 16 months after SARS-Cov-2 started to spread widely in Britain, the government is looking at public provision of quarantine accommodation for people who would otherwise be trying to “self-isolate” in crowded housing. It still hasn’t budged on isolation pay beyond its meagrely-available £500 payment and concessions forced by campaigning in some areas (some care homes, Test Centres, etc.). It is not supporting the demand to end patent restrictions on Covid vaccines, and requisition Big Pharma assets to speed vaccine production. World jab rates have increased a little, from 0.2 jabs...

The new mobilisation of the Palestinians within Israel is, or could be, a historic shift. The Arab grandees, and much of the small middle class, had fled Palestine before the 1948 war started, many hoping to avoid war and return after the Arab states had won. The Arabs remaining in Israel after the war and the expulsions were mostly peasants. They lived mostly under military government until 1966. Large tracts of their land were seized by chicanery. As with the Palestinian Arab people in the West Bank and Gaza who submitted to Jordan and Egypt seizing those areas and extinguishing the UN...

Kenan Malik’s column in the Observer of 23 May starts by arguing that the slogan “from the river to the sea” is a sectarian dead-end in both current variants. “In the hands of Hamas, it is a call for the driving out of all Jews from the region”; in the hands of Netanyahu, it has “blocked any workable two-state solution”. There are two nations in the area. The Israeli Jews have recent historical experience of their parents and grandparents being massacred in Europe, denied refuge worldwide, and expelled from Arab states; the Palestinian Arabs, of expulsions and of mistreatment under Jordanian...

Up to 3,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Saturday 22 May, in the largest anti-occupation protest in many years. The protest was called by Omdim be’Yachad (Standing Together), a left-wing social movement seeking to mobilise both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in a common struggle for equality. Slogans included “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies”. Addressing the rally, Sally Abed, a Palestinian leader of Standing Together, said: “I refuse to return to the routine of institutional discrimination, of police violence and political arrests. I refuse to have second-class...

On Tuesday 18 May, Palestinian workers and businesses in Gaza and the West Bank, along with Palestinian citizens of Israel, participated in a general strike, in protest at Israel’s bombing of Gaza and ongoing suppression of Palestinian rights. The strike involved workers withdrawing their labour, and shopkeepers and businesses closing up for the day. The call for the strike, which quickly went viral across Palestinian society, seems to have originated with the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, a cross-party body which has semi-official status in Israel. Former Hadash leader...

This is an abridged version of a speech given by Alon-Lee Green, co-director of Standing Together, at a demonstration on 20 May, taken from Twitter . “We are here this evening — and this is important for me to say — not only because we want to stand together, Arabs and Jews, Jews and Arabs, and not only because we want to stop the violence. We are here because we want peace. Because we want to put an end to the settlements, to the wars, to the constant rounds of violence. “We are here today not only to say that this is not inevitable, but to prove that this is not inevitable. We are here today...

On 15 and 22 May London saw large demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians. The anger at the bombing of Gaza and the Israeli government’s disregard for Palestinian rights is fully justified. But as I talked with young people on the demonstrations, it became clear that some have picked up reactionary ideas: that Jews should be driven out of the Middle East, that they are Europe’s “problem”, and that the Holocaust is exaggerated by Israeli Jews in their own interests. Many of these ideas are promoted by various shades of political Islamism, expressed on the demo by the very common...

Socialist Worker has detailed and decried deaths and casualties in Gaza. And rightly so! But Socialist Worker has not found the space or the inclination to report on protests by movements like Standing Together. Instead, it refers to Hamas, persistently and euphemistically, as a “resistance organisation”, and compares it in favourable terms to other Palestinian forces for its “militancy”. Hamas is a far-right political-Islamist party and militia with its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood. It favours the military conquest of Israel and the setting up of an Islamic state in historic Palestine...

Antisemitic attacks in the USA over the two weeks to 23 May ran at over twice their average rate in 2019, according to figures collected by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Some examples: “A synagogue received an email... ‘Die fucking jew cockroaches! Israel = racism, apartheid, genocide’... a Jewish man wearing a Star of David necklace was punched by a man who allegedly asked him, ‘What is that around your neck, does that make you a fucking Zionist?’... “A Jewish man was beaten by a group of anti-Israel protestors in Times Square [New York]. In another incident, anti-Zionist protestors...