Over the weekend, Brazilians elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva president once more by a very narrow margin, defying polls that had him trailing. No candidate had won a Brazilian runoff from second place since 1989. That precedent is broken, and it was broken from below: by student-led rallies in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Porto Alegre.

The rallies were called without Lula, by pop-star fan communities and influencers who injected energy into a campaign that had flagged all year, and by widespread mass communications like Deputy André Janones's WhatsApp channel, which passed 10 million followers. Many of those young figures have been vocal on Palestine. Their job now is to make sure their government hears them.

That mobilisation will matter all the more given the political landscape Lula faces. The Congress that convenes on 1 February will comprise 594 members, 513 deputies and 81 senators, with the right and its allies holding a comfortable majority in both houses. With 90 members close to the Palestinian struggle, the challenge will be to turn that support, alongside pressure from civil society, into concrete political action.

Palestine

Lula's words have been strong in recent years. He recognised the State of Palestine in 2010, the first in South America to do so, condemned the genocide in Gaza as early as October 2023, and did not back down when the Israeli colonial regime declared him persona non grata over his Holocaust comparison.

Brazil joined South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice and has had no ambassador in Tel Aviv since May 2024. His actions, however, were fewer. Diplomatic and trade relations with Israel were never fully cut. The Army’s planned purchase of 36 armoured howitzers from Elbit Systems was stalled in 2024 amid political opposition over military ties with Israel. The deal resurfaced in October 2026 after Brazilian defence company Avibras, reached an agreement with Elbit’s Brazilian subsidiary, AEL Sistemas, paving the way for local assembly.

The proposed purchase, worth almost $200 million, remained controversial after renewed public backlash, and the army subsequently cancelled the planned signing of the initial contract for two units. However, the wider procurement was not cancelled.

Lula has always been a conciliator. But a fourth and last term with popular backing opens room for much bolder steps, including ending trade relations with illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, withdrawing from the Mercosur–Israel Free Trade Agreement, imposing a total embargo on weapons and technology transfers with the Zionist regime, and investigating and halting any indirect exports of Brazilian oil through third-country intermediaries.

The recognition of Palestine itself came at the end of his second term, and was then seen as his last.

For Palestinian solidarity movements, Lula’s victory above all means keeping the conditions they work under today, which are far more favourable than those a Flávio government would offer. The government remains open to dialogue with civil society, its own rhetoric lends legitimacy to the cause, and the state does not throw its weight behind the campaign against it.

Holding the line

Lula's government is not immune to Zionist lobbies, however. They continue to influence leaders close to the president and elected officials within his Workers' Party (PT) and Congress, where it needs centrist allies.

Even under Lula, part of the work will be to contest the government itself.

The institutional climate will remain turbulent. The reaction from Bolsonaro's supporters, especially if backed by Trump, is a challenge the PT anticipates. But the balance has shifted. Flávio will lose the privileged forum his Senate seat gives him, and with investigations advancing, he could face arrest.

Eduardo Bolsonaro, second in the family's line of command, is a fugitive in the United States after a Supreme Court justice issued an arrest warrant and cancelled his passports. He was sentenced to four years and two months for coercing the judicial process through lobbying Washington for sanctions against Brazilian magistrates.

From Florida, he has advised his brother to flee if defeated and joked about US Marines intervening. The family cannot hold political capital while their assets disperse.

Lula's path is to strengthen republican institutions – the Supreme Court included –, but he would be boxed in by a Senate taken over by the Bolsonarista party, which confirms justices and can impeach them.

Sustained public mobilisation in the streets and online could also help expose the networks of corruption and patronage that sustain the far-right’s power in Congress. Investigations into Banco Master and parliamentary budget amendments could weaken some of these networks and make it harder for politicians to convert economic power into political influence.

For the Palestinian movement, this matters. Challenging the interests that protect Zionist politicians is part of building a Congress more accountable to the public and less willing to enable complicity in the occupation.

Brazil’s importance in the region and to the cause is based on many factors; Brazil holds a third of Latin America's population and GDP, its main instrument abroad has never been economic or military might but diplomacy, and the country has built its influence on multilateralism, mediation and coalitions such as the BRICS. Gains made in Brazil tend to spread, as the wave of recognition of Palestine that followed 2010 showed.

In the region, Brazil is now an exception. Seven South American governments are aligned with Donald Trump, and Brazil is the largest country still holding out. Israel and the United States – as governments but also through Big Tech companies like META - invested here for years to change that. They have failed, for now.

Ultimately, a generation of young political figures carried this campaign, vocal on Palestine and with a strong presence online. In a contest increasingly fought on social media, a terrain the right had long dominated, the left has begun to close the gap. The platforms themselves are part of that dispute, and Meta's seeming interference in the campaign has become a matter of national and international debate.

The dispute over Brazil's public digital payment system (PIX) has also exposed US interest in challenging a model that threatens the dominance of American payment companies.

Furthermore, Brazil has a vibrant independent press that is often more receptive to the Palestinian cause. The country’s media landscape also includes major broadcasters such as TV Globo (formerly Rede Globo), Brazil’s largest television network and one of the country’s most influential media organisations. Its televised political debates attract large audiences and shape public discussion, with their coverage and political implications often resonating beyond Brazil’s borders.

Internationally, Lula's surprising victory and popular mobilisation must inspire and trickle to other countries where people are protesting in their masses against growing authoritarianism, fascism and neoliberal economic policies - all aligned with the Zionist regime - in France, India, Spain, and Serbia.

The pendulum is likely to swing in Brazil by 2030, and the next four years must be used to build irreversible actions toward liberation.

Rula Shadeed is the Co-Director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy.

Follow Rula on Instagram: @pipdbrasil and X: @rabetbypipd

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Editorial: All the signs are that John Healey’s first Budget on Wednesday will be a very modest event indeed. Without precise measures to bring down the cost of living, it could leave the government looking rudderless

© Kirsty O'Connor/Treasury

Some fifteen years ago, I was lucky enough to be in Palestine during the olive harvest season. So much about what I saw on that visit was overwhelmingly sad and infuriating. The ugly infrastructure of apartheid was everywhere—the huge concrete apartheid wall with the looming Israeli sniper towers, checkpoints seemingly at every turn, menacing armed soldiers and hilltops dotted with settlements. But a visit with farmers in a village outside Jenin felt like stepping into an alternate universe, full of joy and beauty.

Multiple generations of Palestinian families all gathered together in varying degrees of work and play. Teenagers, usually glued to their mobile phones, were getting gentle lessons from their elders on the best way to shake the tree branches to loosen the crop. Joyful toddlers waddled around their grandmothers and mothers, who made tea while chatting and preparing the freshest, most delicious bread I’ve ever eaten, filled with fresh cheese and za’atar.

If you could train your eyes on this scene, you could imagine, for a moment, what a free Palestine might look and sound like.

The olive harvest season is not just a time for Palestinians families to gather and celebrate their heritage. It is traditionally the economic lifeblood of Palestine, already under significant pressure because of decades of Israel’s land grabs, not to mention restrictions on exports which benefit Israeli settlers and harm Palestine’s indigenous olive economy under occupation.

The olive harvest used to be a significant part of the economy in the Gaza Strip, where olive trees are now largely a memory of a time past, before endless expanses of rubble dominated the terrain.

A site of existential threat

In recent years, on top of the ordinary hardship of occupation, the olive harvest in the West Bank has increasingly been hit with violence and danger. Gone are the days when the olive groves could offer a glimpse of a possible future life — now they are a site of existential threat and fear.

The UN reported that last week, the official week starting the olive harvest, saw nearly 200 settler attacks across the expanse of the West Bank, with casualties, property damage or both, including damage to 2,500 trees and saplings. This is already more than the 185 comparable incidents recorded during the entire olive harvest season last year in 2025, which was already the worst many could remember.

These settler attacks don’t come out of nowhere. UN human rights experts raised alarm that the Israeli military had issued orders in September for the removal of vegetation, including provisions to uproot olive trees, from approximately 339,000 square metres (84 acres) of Palestinian agricultural land in the West Bank.

In what has now become a predictable pattern, the Israeli military provided a blueprint for settler attacks on the olive harvest through its policies. It is the same military, of course, which provides armed cover for the settlers when they wage their violent attacks.

When Palestinians report that the settlers and the army are working hand in hand, this is what they mean.

News footage from Palestine this week shows this starkly. Farmers work as quickly as possible before the mobs of settlers arrive, armed with clubs or worse. For Palestinian farmers, the thought of bringing family members who aren’t able to work quickly is unimaginable now, because of the looming danger in every minute.

The settler attacks are ruthless and don’t spare any man, woman or child. Mainstream news outlets globally showed videos last weekend of settlers beating and attacking a Washington Post journalist covering the West Bank, as well as European diplomats who had been on an official visit. One journalist who tried to help his colleague reported the difficulty of reaching her. This was not only because of the settlers, but also because the Israeli military was firing tear gas and live ammunition into the area, forcing the Palestinian farmers to flee their own fields.

You don’t need much more information to guess that if that is how white Americans and Europeans are being treated, Palestinians are confronted with violence that is ten times worse.

Weaknesses in the UK government’s response

Here in Britain, Israel’s colonial settlements have had more media exposure in the past few months than possibly ever before, as the British government announced new measures last month to ban the import of settlement goods and some limited sanctions, along with other measures designed to curb the actions of what Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called “settler terrorists”.

Whilst these measures are certainly a step in the right direction, they don’t go nearly as far as they should. This month’s spike in attacks on Palestinians harvesting their olives shows both the weaknesses of the British sanctions as they are currently formulated, but also the possibilities that could be pushed if the government is serious about tackling settler violence.

The weakness of the British government’s position is that it has rhetoric that is tough on settler violence but treats that phenomenon as its own isolated problem. Understanding the inextricable link between the settler movement, the colonial settlements already established for decades, and Israel’s military occupation itself is key to intervening in the violence.

The settlers couldn’t function as they do without the full-throated support they enjoy from the Israeli military. And despite commitments to curb the flow of arms that enable the occupation, no additional arms exports to Israel have been halted since Miliband’s announcement last month.

The problem goes even further if one understands the link between the settler movement and the Israeli government itself. The British government seems to be still entertaining the fantasy that the settler movement can be isolated and treated separately from the Israeli state.

Of course it is the Israeli state itself which, over decades and across parties, has enacted policy and funded the settlements. Nowadays top Israeli government ministers come directly from the far-right settler movement, but this is a result of decades of normalisation of settlements, rather than the start of it.

Even if you could magically remove the far-right settler movement in isolation, many of Israel’s earliest West Bank settlements are now major hubs of the Israeli agricultural industry. They profit from land grabs from Palestinians, enriching themselves from Palestinian land and water, and dominating the exports of produce abroad, whilst Palestinian olive farmers struggle, and still would even without the violent settler attacks.

In order to really tackle settler violence, the British government must extend its sanctions proposal to be state sanctions on Israel. There is no separating out the settlements from the state, and there is no legitimate trade with a state committing apartheid and genocide.

These sanctions must include, but not be limited to, a full two-way arms embargo on Israel.

Stemming from this, the tasks of the solidarity movement are clear. We must continue to push the British government to strengthen its sanctions on Israel, through lobbying and protesting, but also by exposing the contradictions in what is currently in place.

None of these actions will stop the horror of settler attacks during this olive harvest season. The coming month will be a painful time for Palestinians who are being forced to defend themselves, their families, their livelihoods and their lands.

Whilst political debates within our solidarity movement rage on, certainly we can all agree that we absolutely cannot lose sight of the stakes for Palestinians, and the horrible costs they are paying every day. But this urgency must compel our solidarity forward to push our government to enact full sanctions on Israel now.

Ryvka Barnard is the Deputy Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK.

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of their employer, or of The New Arab and its editorial board or staff.

Last week, the forensic digital security NGO Citizen Lab documented a cyberattack it named Adfection. It was found on 45 Al Jazeera journalists’ computers. It used zero-click spyware created by Israeli spyware developer Candiru, which implanted malware in ads displayed on a web page. It infected the computer and gave access to nearly every user activity, including email, texts, video and audio, browser activity, etc. The targeted user did not have to click on a link or download a file.

The campaign required an online company to buy the ads which compromised the device. It was an Israeli company called Discover-Tech. Its platform, Controlium, strips the anonymity of targeted individuals even if they have encrypted or masked their digital footprint. The ads also covertly directed millions of devices to Candiru’s servers, where their content was harvested for large-scale tracking and reconnaissance.

Citizen Lab noted that Discover Tech purports to be a legitimate ad company. But in reality, it is a front for large-scale Israeli espionage

This campaign required a second player, the spyware firm, Candiru. Ironically, it was named for an Amazonian fish which feeds on the blood of host fishes. Considering its business model, the name seems apt. Candiru wrote the code which was implanted with the ads. They then placed the ads on specific websites visited by targeted individuals.

Its partner, Discover-Tech, not only placed the ads but also amassed geo-data that let it identify and track targets, a process known as microtargeting. They track users’ physical location and follow their movements. The spyware also tracks devices in cellular, Wi-Fi, or VPN modes.

Discover-Tech placed 4 billion ad bids. The ads were served on 200,000 different Android and Apple apps and various websites. In particular, they targeted defence, foreign affairs, internal security, military and intelligence bodies. These agencies included NATO, the Pentagon, the International Criminal Court, Israeli government ministries (foreign, defence, police), and the European Parliament. In all, users in 23 countries were attacked.

Candiru, which designed Adfection, has led a mysterious existence since its founding in 2014. It has changed its name repeatedly to skirt sanctions and accountability. It is currently named Integrity Labs. Another bit of irony considering the “integrity” of malware design.

Its website claims it is based in Hong Kong with offices in various Asian cities. It doesn’t mention Herzliya, where it was founded and where its CEO is based.

In fact, Israeli companies seeking to shield themselves from exposure and avoid potential interference from Israeli regulations employ a well-known subterfuge by moving operations abroad. Similarly, Integrity Labs’ peripatetic existence “created a corporate buffer to distance its operations from US sanctions [against Candiru] while continuing to deploy surveillance tools.”

Who engineered the spyware campaign?

Citizen Lab declined to identify which country or government entity managed this overall project. It seems highly likely it was Israel, considering a majority of those targeted were either in Europe or the Middle East.

The most likely Israeli source for such a campaign is the IDF’s SIGINT branch, Unit 8200, whose mission is to intercept communications using precisely the tools developed by Candiru/Integrity Labs. 

Israel also has explicit interest in many of the entities targeted, including the Pentagon, ICC and Al Jazeera. Though Adfection appeared on Pentagon computers, Citizen Lab did not indicate whether US intelligence assets were attacked as well.

Israel is a world leader in developing surveillance, spyware, and cyber-attack products. The IDF field tests many of them in Palestine, which is among the most surveilled places on earth. There are tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, facial recognition technology, AI, drones, telecommunication intercepts, and a massive database compiled on every individual Palestinian.

Israel's primary signals intelligence corps, Unit 8200, has created multiple AI-based tools to exert control over a restive population. Among them are Where’s Daddy, Ha’bsorah (“Good News”), and Fire Factory. The AI program, Lavender, assigns a 1 to 100 score for all 2.5 million Gazans to determine if they should be killed. In other words, artificial intelligence makes life-and-death decisions leading to the murder of thousands of Palestinians.

Many Israeli companies like NSO Group, Candiru, Intellexa, Cellebrite, Circles and Paragon were founded by Unit 8200 veterans. They are leaders in the development of spyware used by police and intelligence agencies throughout the world to surveil—and even murder--human rights activists, journalists (among them, Jamal Khashoggi), and lawyers. They are products of the Israeli surveillance state, exported worldwide along with the oppressive values they represent.

Israel has created a Brave New World of digital surveillance and sold it to some of the most dangerous individuals and repressive regimes on earth. It is a World of chaos and cruelty, like Hobbes' war of all against all.

International bodies like the United Nations appear unable or unwilling to impose any regulation on these nefarious tools, which pose a grave threat to democracy, justice and human rights.

Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog and is a freelance journalist specialising in exposing secrets of the Israeli national security state. He campaigns against opacity and the negative impact of Israeli military censorship.

Follow Richard on X: @richards1052

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

In Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, Ian Lustick borrows a joke from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. A man tells his therapist that his brother thinks he is a chicken. Why not have him treated? I would,’ the man replies, ‘but I need the eggs.’

When I interviewed Lustick some years ago, I asked who was still collecting eggs from the two-state solution long after the conditions for it had vanished. He replied: American administrations, the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government, and what he called the ‘peace process industry’. By that, he meant the international institutions, NGOs, and experts whose careers rest on the promise of a settlement that never materialises.

That joke stayed with me as the West Bank moved to the centre of mainstream media coverage. Journalists have been attacked by settlers on camera. Israeli army commanders and officials have been publicly questioned about settler violence. All of it has unfolded to the sound of an alarm so old it has become part of the furniture: the two-state solution is under threat.

In much of Western politics and media, criticising “extreme settlers” is the cheapest form of criticism there is. One can condemn settler violence, denounce Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and perhaps blame Benjamin Netanyahu for wrecking the prospects of peace, all without asking more difficult questions about the Israeli state or the support that sustains it.

This kind of criticism leaves room for a comforting assumption: the problem is this government. Remove it and another Israeli partner, ready for peace, may yet appear. With Israelis voting on 27 October, where is that partner?

The leading alternatives to Netanyahu do not fundamentally disagree over settlement or control of the West Bank. Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief often cast as the man who could lead Israel out of the Netanyahu impasse, has pledged that no Palestinian state will be established under any government he forms.

Naftali Bennett, who now leads Yachad, his joint list with Yair Lapid, once served as director-general of the Yesha Council, the settlers’ umbrella body. He has also proposed annexing Area C, which covers more than 60% of the West Bank. Even Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats and, by Israeli standards, a dove, called talk of a Palestinian state destructive.

Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the settler population has grown from about 250,000 to more than 750,000. Much of this growth occurred during the peace process itself, under governments the world regarded as moderate.

One of the busiest years for settlement construction was 2000, under Ehud Barak. In 2008, while Ehud Olmert was negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas after Annapolis, Israel began building more settlement homes in the West Bank than in any year under his predecessor, Ariel Sharon. Olmert has since found a second career on Western television warning about the consequences of the first.

Most Palestinians stopped waiting for that partner long ago. Experience has taught us that settlement is not a policy of the Israeli system. It is the system. That doesn’t make Israeli politicians the same; they don't all treat every form of violence against Palestinians the same way. But the real disagreements are about how to manage, regulate, and institutionalise that violence, and how much violence can be used before the political and diplomatic bill becomes too high.

In August, when the Housing Ministry opened bidding on some 1,200 homes in E1, the corridor east of Jerusalem that would cut the West Bank in two, Eisenkot objected only to the timing, while calling a Palestinian state a “grave mistake”. He had no quarrel with the map, only the calendar.

When settler violence is presented as the exception, and reduced to the extremism of Netanyahu and his allies, it becomes possible to maintain the image of another Israel, one that is moderate, merely waiting for its turn to govern and resume the peace process.

That is how the promise of two states outlives every fact on the ground. Its political power never rested on its feasibility. It has always lain in the capacity to sustain a particular political fantasy about Israel. That fantasy separates Israel as a political system, to be allied with, from the ‘incidental’ excesses of that state.

Decades of ‘peacemaking’ and billions in funding have entrenched it so deeply that questioning it now seems harder than questioning Israel’s violations themselves.

This fantasy survives through fragmentation. In Gaza, the genocide is treated as an excessive use of otherwise legitimate force. In the West Bank, the violence is treated as an extremist deviation from Israel’s political order, one that an election result could end at any moment.

And inside Israel, abuses against Palestinian citizens are framed as threats to an established democracy. Read the mainstream Western press on each, or listen to European and even American officials, and you could be forgiven for thinking they were describing three different countries.

Perhaps these are the new eggs in Lustick’s joke. The West can go on condemning what it sees, so long as it keeps waiting for an Israel that does not exist. On 27 October, Israelis will vote, and the wait will be renewed, as it has after every election before. Its arrival was never the point. The longer the West keeps waiting for the Israel it imagines, the less it has to deal with the one that is already here.

Izzeddin Araj is a Palestinian journalist and researcher. He is the Executive Director of Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Arabic network Ultra Sawt. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from The Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID).

Follow Izzeddin on X: @ArajIzzeddin

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Donald Trump has cancelled the Pentagon’s plan to livestream Nidal Hasan’s execution after an outcry from Republicans and Democrats alike. Yet the former US Army psychiatrist, convicted of murdering 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood in 2009, is still scheduled to face a firing squad on 3 December. If it goes ahead, it will be the US military’s first execution since 1961.

The prospect of broadcasting the killing provoked a political backlash. The decision to kill him remains intact.

Under the current Trump administration, one might think we have seen it all, that hardly anything can shock us. Yet almost every day, the US rulers seem to raise the threshold of what the ‘civilised world’ can tolerate, commit to and advocate.

I did not see the proposed return to public executions coming. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted an audience for the military’s next killing; Trump has decided that the public will not be allowed to watch.

American killing machine

As an opponent of capital punishment, I see no crime that requires transforming an execution into entertainment potentially available to millions, including children. But the removal of a camera should not be mistaken for a retreat from state violence.

While the military is preparing to resume executions after a 65-year hiatus, we must remember that the wider American killing machine never went away in the first place.

Individual jurisdictions have abolished capital punishment or suspended its use, but the machinery remains operational. In 2024, 25 people were executed and 47 in 2025, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

Beyond execution chambers, the toll is far greater. According to Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence project, US police killed at least 1,314 people in 2025, an average of 3.6 every day. Even that horrifying toll represented a 5% decline from 2024, the first annual decrease in six years.

Black people were still 2.6 times as likely as white people to be killed. These figures cover police killings in many different circumstances, rather than judicial executions. But they demolish any suggestion that lethal state violence had taken a holiday.

Then there are the deaths without execution warrants or guns. A 2023 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine associated poverty with approximately 183,000 US deaths in 2019. Another study, following people identified as homeless in the 2010 census, found that those under 65 faced 3.5 times the mortality risk of housed people after accounting for demographic and geographical differences. Researchers also estimated that more than two million deaths during the 2020 and 2021 pandemic years could have been avoided if US mortality rates had matched those in 21 other wealthy countries.

Poverty, inadequate housing and denial of healthcare are silent mass killers whose victims are unlikely to make headlines or front-page news. This is structural violence, with political responsibility resting on US elites, which is otherwise conveniently obscured.

America today

Political choices shape access to treatment, decent housing, safe work, and adequate food. The ruling US elites have repeatedly subordinated those needs to profit. By all accounts, today’s America is a social Darwinist experiment on steroids. The poor are poor because they deserve it. The sick die because they cannot afford treatment, so what?

The state must not intervene to provide protection because, God forbid, that would be socialism. The cruelty is routinely dressed up as individual responsibility and economic common sense.

Trump’s administration brings a more openly vindictive politics to this inheritance. Racism, misogyny, and xenophobia feed its vocabulary of hierarchy. Take, for example, Trump’s language about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country. Once people are represented as contamination, cruelty toward them becomes easier to sell as national renewal. Across the country, masked ICE agents are snatching foreigners, breaking up families, and shooting protesters in the name of the law.

Abroad, the same entitlement assumes imperial proportions. US forces seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. Trump entertained taking Greenland by force before ruling out military action at Davos. The US and Israel launched another war against Iran in February. Kidnapping a foreign president, treating another people’s territory as an acquisition, and promising salvation through bombardment revive the prerogatives of nineteenth-century colonialism.

Hegseth, who proposed the latest live-streamed execution, gives this politics a crusading aesthetic. The civilian Pentagon chief bears a Jerusalem Cross and “Deus Vult” tattoos, and has promoted conservative Christianity inside the military. His church network is associated with a patriarchal Christian nationalism. Its prominent pastor, Doug Wilson, advocates postmillennialism, envisioning Christian rule before Christ’s return. This combination of religious supremacy and military power gives the execution proposal a particularly ominous setting.

Michel Foucault helps us understand the relationship between public punishment and less visible forms of coercion. In Discipline and Punish, he argues that public execution was a ritual through which the ruling authority reasserted itself. But the retreat of the scaffold did not make punishment humane.

Power changed its methods, working through prisons, institutions and everyday routines. Live-streaming Hasan’s execution would have created a power spectacle. Does the cancellation mean a return to rationality? Not necessarily. It leaves the coercive institutions and their authority in place.

Hegseth’s supporters have presented the execution as a warning to would-be killers. The argument for deterrence, however, lacks empirical support. Existing research cannot provide any conclusions on whether capital punishment increased, decreased, or had no effect on homicide.

American rulers preside over death through several different mechanisms: execution orders, armed policing, policies that leave millions vulnerable to preventable illness and poverty, and wars waged abroad. A society cannot claim to respect human life while treating so much death as acceptable, unavoidable or even exemplary.

The self-proclaimed enlightened world should be judged by the lives it protects and the power it restrains. Trump can cancel the livestream. The machinery behind it remains.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany, focusing on the military, policing, and labour.

Follow Hossam on X: @3arabawy

Have questions or comments? Email us at editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab.

On a rare holiday, on my first visit to Paris, I took the Metro from the modernist wonders of the 13th arrondissement to my next destination. Two stops before I was meant to get off to visit an art gallery, I saw an army of children with homemade placards and keffiyehs marching down the platform at Sully Morland. Instinctively inclined towards the idea that these rebellious kids could probably produce more creativity in one single protest than any art gallery could muster (a joke, kind of), I departed from my premeditated route and before I knew it, I was marching on the Bastille with tens of thousands of young working-class kids letting out their frustration and fury at an education system that was failing them and set only to worsen.

This crowd was a mosaic of multicultural France: white kids side-by-side with those from the Parisian banlieues whose roots trace right back across the Maghreb, Western and Central Africa, linking arms with teachers and trade unionists, making clear their opposition to the far-right National Rally (RN), current President Emmanuel Macron, and the ongoing acts of imperial violence in Palestine, Congo and Sudan.

More carnivalesque than a simple protest, this unleashed repressed energies from a generation of teenagers vilified by the press, forced into silos of demeaning desocialisation by social media platforms, and subjected to increasing impoverishment by a punishing austerity regime fronted by Macron.

The people have had enough

The ire of protesters’ antipathy: the French schooling system is in prolonged decay.

France has the highest class sizes in Europe; teachers are increasingly forced out of the profession by low pay, declining vacancies, and poor treatment, and the physical infrastructure that underpins French schooling is increasingly strained by dilapidation, infestation, and extreme weather conditions.

As William Bouchardon has noted in Jacobin, classes regularly miss teachers, there is a shortage of both school nurses and aides for children with disabilities and learning difficulties, and these realities are felt in racialised, working-class France. This is compounded by the reality that ministers contemplate further rounds of austerity as they defend, in the case of former National Education Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castér, sending their own children to private schools.

France, like so much of the world, is a country simmering with unease, class conflict and political polarisation. In Spain, the violent eviction and eventual death of Maricarmen Abascal was the catalyst for an unprecedented wave of militant national housing protests, sparking an early election initiated by Socialist Party Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

In Belgium, workers have fought and struck against exacerbating impoverishment and fiscal retrenchment. And in Brazil, millions have taken to the streets against the prospect of a far-right government led by Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio. The world could be on the cusp of a sequence of global social revolt unseen in over a decade.

France Unbowed

One political project uniquely primed to take advantage of this radicalisation and polarisation is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed Party (LFI). Founded ten years ago, the long product of a rupture from traditional French social democracy, LFI has become increasingly identified with the youth protests. Recently elected Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko was subject to international acclaim, even compared to Spider-Man, for his brave defence of youths tear-gassed by the French riot police.

Bagayoko has also found himself under frequent attack by centrist and right-wing politicians and pundits, almost always with a deeply racist edge, such as the insults which saw him compared to a crack cocaine addict.

Similarly, Mélenchon faced political abuse since his resignation from François Mitterrand’s ambitious but eventually capitulating Socialist Party government in the 1980s. The LFI leader and long-time Presidential candidate was filmed sharing an intimate intergenerational moment with a student protester, made famous overnight for humiliating a journalist who tried to ask fellow protesters leading questions in the midst of the action.

Despite regular criticism of Mélenchon’s uninterrupted control of this start-up party, its rise to prominence is undeniable. As one keen observer of French politics noted to me, if you belonged to that generation of millennials increasingly radicalised by the 2008 financial crash and the attempts to manage it in the rich’s interests, in France, you’ve seen the Mélenchon project increase its influence, voter share and cultural resonance every single year since 2010.

In the 2022 presidential election, Mélenchon was a single point away from defeating far-right Marine Le Pen and making the second round against now-outgoing President Macron. In the 2024 legislative election, LFI was the largest component of the Nouveau Front Populaire, which won the contest and forced Macron to deny the democratic wishes of the French electorate by desperately appointing European technocrat Michel Barnier as Prime Minister.

Two years later, with Barnier lasting only months, centre-right politician Sébastian Lecornu now holds the role in alliance with the Macronists.

Mélenchon’s party has proven adept at exploiting the crisis of French neoliberalism, speaking to people’s anguish over the decimation of their living conditions, their increasing disenfranchisement, and a deep-seated feeling of alienation from the state, from nature, and from each other.

Anti-racism and Palestine

The party’s ‘A Shared Future’ (L’avenir en commun) programme which invokes the formation of a Sixth Republic which decentralises democratic control over society; guarantees the right to free energy and water in every household; and establishes ‘eco-regions’ geared towards protecting nature, agriculture and planetary life through ecological planning.

It is also a party which has undergone a profound set of ideological and moral changes since the turn of the decade. For example, in 2016, it would not have been a surprise to encounter Mélenchon and his coterie lauding the uniquely French brand of secularism, Laïcité. Whilst theoretically a paean to the history of French republicanism and the separation between church and state, in practice this state ideology has functioned as the basis for criminalising and defiling France’s large and diverse Muslim community.

A decade ago, LFI would have entertained this jamboree of racialised recrimination, entertaining Islamophobic policies such as the banning of the hijab. Today, Mélenchon’s populism has shifted, shaped by the rise of social movements in solidarity with Palestine, against racist state violence such as the police murder of Nahel Merzouk, and advocating a form of what the party describes as ‘creolisation’, the celebrated intermingling of cultures from across the world fundamentally changing the fabric of the French people themselves.

LFI has become a much more vigorously anti-racist and internationalist project. Among its senior cadre today, along with National Coordinator Manuel Bompard and President of elected representatives in the National Assembly Mathilde Panot, you encounter long-term anti-racist advocates such as the Gabonese-French representative of the Parisian 17th arrondissement Danièle Obono and Palestinian organiser and now LFI representative in the European Parliament, Rima Hassan.

This shift in policy and outlook also mediates a strategic recalculation. Partly because of the benefits of the French electoral system, LFI is actively geared towards building the core of its support base in the multicultural suburbs of France’s major cities. This is particularly the case among what party strategist Bompard has termed the ‘Fourth Bloc’ of young and racialised working-class voters who traditionally do not vote.

As the 2027 presidential election approaches, Mélenchon is consolidating his dominance over the left bloc in French society. With the Socialist Party now endorsing notorious centrist Raphael Glucksmann and the Ecologistes remaining divided over who they might break for, the LFI leader looks increasingly likely, according to polling, to be the principal challenger to Marine Le Pen’s violently toxic brand of far-right politics in the second round of next year’s election.

At last Wednesday’s protest, there were loud chants of ‘Mélenchon, Ballon D’or’ from the crowd of Paris’ youth demonstrators. A few days later, I spoke to a group of young men in their mid-twenties in La République. They were Mélenchon-sceptics but were clear they would vote for him to keep out Le Pen. For this historic figure of the French radical left, and this insurgent party of militants he has helped inaugurate as a model for left-wing politics globally, both dynamics will be essential to LFI defeating the far-right and implementing their programme when in power.

Jonas Marvin is the author of The Breaking of the English Working Class. He also cohosts Life of the Party podcast and blogs at Marx’s Dream Journal.

Follow Jonas on X: mØØdyjonas

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.