Following failed attempts to convince Palestinians to turn on Hamas by arming opportunist gangs in Gaza and inflating Gaza’s anti-leadership sentiment (and finding no shortage of support in Western media outlets, backed by political cowards who equate the roles of Israel and Hamas), the state of Israel is now trying to do the same in Iran but with ever-more direct support from the United States. Israel, increasingly desperate to shore up US support for its occupying colony, is trying to exploit popular Iranian opposition to its government, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to destabilise that nation.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu asserted in a statement aimed at Iranians, “The Islamic regime, which has oppressed you for nearly fifty years, threatens to destroy my country, the state of Israel. The objective of Israel’s military operation is to remove this threat.” Bombing a people to try to garner their support is a fairly absurd gamble, but as it is largely Iranian lives on the chopping block, the Israeli regime seems happy enough to do so – and threaten the lives of Iranian generals’ families for good measure. Behind the official statements, the primary gambit seems to be to draw in an unpredictable Trump, head of the divided US-right, into active war with Iran. At the time of writing, US bombs are falling on Iranian nuclear facilities, while Democrats bicker about whether this war of aggression followed due process. The Israeli ruling class is getting what it wants.
We largely know what comes next from the so-called leaders of the world. The ruling class of the global south offers its rhetorical condemnations, and the ruling class of the global north suggests that everyone de-escalates and calls on Iran to “show restraint” (while continuing to buy and sell arms and resources with the aggressors, US and Israel). But what actually happens in the coming weeks and months depends on the balance of forces. Trump has ‘ordered’ the evacuation of Iran’s capital, Tehran, followed by US defence officials reminding us that while Trump is not considering a US nuclear assault on Iran, it could if it wanted to. Meanwhile, our side, the international working class, has overwhelmingly and consistently mobilised in solidarity with Palestine on a scale and longevity not seen since the invasion of Iraq. Our actions, from mass rallies, to collective-form boycotts and sanctions, to lobbying through collective bodies like trade unions, and direct action such as blocking ships and occupying factories has without a doubt shaped, and weakened, the imperialist assault on Gaza. Not nearly enough, of course – opposing the global imperial superpower of the USA and its watchdog Israel (that is to say, changing the entire world order of power and hegemony) is no easy task. But this is the vital battle that will define this historical moment, and it is our task to orient ourselves within it – and today that means solidarity with Iran.
Our organisation has written on the Iranian people’s struggle for a more liberatory politics, and their struggle against the theocratic weaponisation of Islam that has been used to justify state murders, forced child marriage and rape, and political repression, including of socialist politics. There is no question that the Iranian struggle against the Islamic Republic government is full of internal contradiction itself – it is a politically eclectic and volatile social movement containing politics ranging from socialism to monarchism to outright advocacy for US-backed regime change, bound together by very little except the drive for greater civil liberties. Nonetheless, on principle we support their struggle to forge their own politics without being bombed into a position palatable to the West.
In only the past few years, we have watched as waves of working class resistance have risen in Iran, and been crushed by the boot of the Iranian state, through executions and mass arrests, for the crime of dissidence. We see the future of Iran in these movements, the self-organisation of the working class, and we will support the struggle of the Iranian working class to smash their own shackles and build a life for the good of its people, not for the power of its ruling theocratic class. We also refuse the traps of bourgeois feminism which call for Western intervention and broad economic sanctions, and the obvious distortions of the Women Life Freedom movement which aim to turn a liberatory social movement into a platform for welcoming the US and Israel as liberators.
The moment that Israeli bombs inflicted death upon Iranian civilians, campists raised their voices to blame those who stood in solidarity with Iranian victims of state violence, from family members of the dead, through to parliamentary parties, for creating a political environment hostile to Iran. We reject this view. Our principled defence of women’s bodily autonomy, political freedom, and workers’ rights does not wax and wane depending on the geopolitics of the moment. At the same time, we reject the pursuit of those liberties being used to justify imperialist slaughter and US/Israel-backed regime change. Middle Eastern dictatorships of capital, from Iran to Egypt to Syria, offer no real path to liberation. We put our faith in the peoples of those nations, not their ruling classes, and certainly not the bombs of genocidal imperialist nation states.
As Iranian author Sahar Delijani writes:
“I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves. Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven’t lived in blood and bone. That doesn’t mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins. If your vision of liberation comes only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it’s not freedom you’re after.”
Our solidarity is international, and it does not begin or end with Palestine. We stand with Palestine both because we stand against the domination of oppressor nations, and also because we understand that the humans who exist there are being oppressed and exterminated because the Levant is the lynchpin of global trade. Today, we also stand with Iran, encircled by US bases in the Middle East and now actively bombed by US and Israeli aggression. We stand with Iran because its people are oppressed not just by their own government but also by global imperialism, and are now killed for a genocidal state’s war plans. We oppose the Western attempts to destabilise it or, if it gets its way, perhaps even balkanise the country sending it further into regional, ethnic and religious skirmishes while Israel expands and kills more peoples to steal more land and resources. Our Palestine solidarity movement is strong – stronger than any anti-imperialist struggle in recent history, but not strong enough to shape history or meaningfully change the course of New Zealand’s ruling class. Our task now is to consciously grow this social movement into an anti-war movement, one which strives to defend Palestine and Iran, but also to challenge our own ruling class. We need to build an anti-war movement which unites the Palestine solidarity movement, the Iranian working class in the diaspora, the liberatory battle for tino rangatiratanga, and the homegrown multiethnic working class of our nation (and beyond). Even without the obvious argument that we shouldn’t let death rain down in innocent people, we ought to be able to convince our neighbours that their tax dollars shouldn’t be sent across the world to explode, or train invading soldiers – and they sure as hell shouldn’t want to be those invading soldiers.
So these are our calls today: Defeat for the US and Israel’s war of aggression! End Zionism in our lifetime! Hands off Iran! US out of the Middle East!
Image Credit: Avash Media, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=167733333
