by Eugene Walker

As Israel’s Netanyahu, the U.S.’s Trump, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei each launched their weapons of war, none gave a damn about Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, or about Iranians’ Woman, Life, Freedom uprising or Israeli civilians.

Netanyahu and his Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have murdered tens of thousands of citizens in Gaza—the majority are women and children—and hundreds more in the West Bank since October 2023, following Hamas’ horrendous terrorist attack. Israel’s actions, including the starvation of hundreds of thousands in Gaza, further decimation bombing of its population, and now the deaths of hundreds of Iranians in the 12-day war, presently under ceasefire, are war crimes.

Iran’s theocratic regime—which usurped the 1979 Revolution, murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens and jailed thousands of others during its decades-long dictatorship—launched ballistic missiles at Israel, killing a number of citizens and making thousands homeless.

Trump, in conjunction with Netanyahu, dropped a dozen 30,000-pound bombs (the world’s largest non-nuclear weapon) seeking to destroy Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capacity. This, after withdrawing from a nuclear agreement in his first term. Despite this moment’s ceasefire, we could be entering a new phase of Middle East wars. Netanyahu’s strategy for staying in power and out of prison depends on permanent war.

Death and destruction via imperialist interventions as well as homegrown dictatorships and authoritarian rule have often dominated the region. But the Middle East has also witnessed massive and creative struggles for liberation, including revolutions.

IRAN: THEOCRATIC RULE vs. RESISTANCE OF WOMEN, WORKERS, YOUTH, MINORITIES

In Iran reports show that destruction from Israel’s attack was not alone at nuclear sites but included civilian-occupied areas—homes, refineries, workplaces. Its bombing of the notorious Evin Prison, known for holding and torturing dissidents, managed to kill prisoners and visitors as well as staff and has made conditions even worse for the political prisoners there. While Israel claimed that they carried out the strike “in a precise manner to mitigate harm to civilians,” it took place during visiting hours. Satellite and video imagery showed that they demolished “a visitation area for families, a medical center and a solitary confinement cell block”—an area that often houses political prisoners.

A joint statement from five independent organizations—including bus workers in Tehran, a sugarcane workers syndicate and a retirees’ alliance—criticized Israel’s attacks, but focused on their own rulers:

“We, the workers and toilers of Iran, have for many years paid a heavy price—prison, torture, execution, dismissal, threats, and beatings—for our right to basic living standards. We are still denied the right to organize, to gather, and to speak freely. Workers and toilers in this country are rightfully furious and fed up with the Islamic Republic and the capitalists who, for over four decades, have amassed enormous wealth on our backs while keeping us in constant insecurity and without rights. All officials and institutions involved in the repression and killing of workers, women, youth, and the oppressed people of Iran must be put on trial and punished by the people themselves.”

The Iranian Writers Association stated:

“There is now fear that the real achievements of the 1401 freedom movement [the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that broke out in Iranian year 1401, or in 2022 by the Gregorian calendar], which itself grew out of earlier uprisings, may be erased in the midst of this aggression—and that in the scorched earth left behind, new forms of extreme nationalism, far-right politics, and neo-fascism may grow. Especially since for both sides—Israel and the Islamic Republic—war is a ‘blessing’ they feed off.”[1] 

IN IRAN: UNCEASING REVOLT FROM BELOW

The Iranian people’s revolt has been unceasing since the 1978-79 Revolution against the Shah, who had been supported by the U.S. That great Revolution was transformed into its opposite by a theocratic counter-revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, whose first counter-revolutionary act was to attack the International Women’s Day celebration where the marching women chanted: “We didn’t make a revolution to be relegated back to dog status,” and “At the dawn of freedom there is no freedom.” In her Political-Philosophic Letters, Raya Dunayevskaya chronicled the creativity of the Iranian masses, particularly the women and workers, and the grave contradictions within the Revolution, as Khomeini and his henchmen moved to usurp it. (See Crossroads of History: Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East by Raya Dunayevskaya.)

Since the Israeli-U.S. 12-day war, Iran’s rulers have increased their campaign of terror against their own citizens. Supposedly to root out spies for Israel, the regime is carrying out a vicious crackdown. As The New York Times reports: “Nearly 1,500 Iranians have been arrested, according to activists and human rights lawyers in Iran. They include professors, musicians, students, dissidents, poets, former political prisoners, members of Iran’s religious and ethnic minorities and grieving parents of slain protesters. Executions are underway. Due process is nonexistent.”

The regime deported hundreds of thousands of Afghan migrants in a matter of days, many of them born and raised in Iran but relegated to low-wage labor. Its official media blared Trump-style racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, which was rejected by independent labor unions, who explicitly compared it to Trump’s actions in the U.S. and who issued powerful statements of solidarity. The Tehran Bus Workers’ Syndicate declared, “We call on all labour and civil organizations to stand firm against this toxic atmosphere of racism and anti-migrant hysteria. Any attack on migrants is an attack on social and class unity—and serves only the interests of ruling regimes and the capitalist system.”

In fact, the genocidal undertone of anti-immigrant politics, from the U.S. to Iran and from India to Germany, reinforces the alarm bells ringing that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not some outlandish exception but rather the signal of where this stage of world capitalism is heading, if it is not stopped.

The tentacles of repression reach everywhere. In Kurdish areas, new checkpoints have been established. Prison conditions have further deteriorated. The parliament passed legislation imposing life in prison and death sentences for violations of “national security,” whatever that means.

No outside force via “regime change” or military actions can bring self-determination to the Iranian masses, no matter how many of Trump or Netanyahu’s flunkies claim it will. The talk of bringing in the original Shah’s grandson is an absurdity. Iranians did not overthrow the Shah for nothing.

Iranians know what they want and can speak for themselves: On Feb. 23, 2023, an array of workers—including those organized into unions independent of any phony regime-controlled unions—issued a “Statement on the current demands of independent trade union and civil organisations in Iran.” Unions of teachers, students, human rights defenders, sugar cane company workers, oil and steel workers, and of course women’s organizations and others signed on to the statement, which read in part:

“Today, these massive protests, the flag of which has been raised by women, students, teachers, workers, those seeking justice, artists, queers, writers, and all oppressed people of Iran in every part of the country from Kurdistan to Sistan and Baluchistan and has received unprecedented international support, is a protest against misogyny, gender discrimination, endless economic insecurity, labour slavery, poverty, misery, class oppression, as well as national and religious oppression. It is a revolution against any form of religious or non-religious tyranny that has been imposed on the Iranian people throughout the last century.…Thus, this movement aims to permanently end the formation of any power from above and to be the beginning of a modern, humane social revolution that frees people from all forms of oppression, discrimination, exploitation, tyranny, and dictatorship.”

Their 12 demands, if met, would transform Iran into one of the freest, most humane countries in the world. It is this movement from below revealing masses as Reason that the rulers from Iran to Israel to the U.S. fear the most and would commit genocide to destroy.

ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS MUST STOP!

Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, where the civilian population has been decimated and the territory turned into rubble, is now imposing suffering and death reminiscent of Germany’s actions against the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. They closed down the UN food program in Gaza, starving Palestinians for weeks on end. Children have already died of starvation and dehydration, while infectious diseases are rampant.

Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet have set up their own “humanitarian” system to distribute far less food than is needed, resulting in total chaos and death. One analyst described it as “aid as an instrument of control, dehumanization, and humiliation, dispensed by armed contractors under the watchful eye of the occupying military.” Nearly 800 Palestinians have been and are being deliberately shot down by Israeli soldiers or hired contractors “guarding” the very few food distribution sites. Hundreds more were wounded.

“Gaza is the hungriest place on earth. When we are able to bring anything in, it’s getting plundered immediately by the population. That’s the level of desperation,” said Jens Laerke, of the UN agency for coordination of humanitarian affairs.

Israel’s defense minister briefed journalists on plans to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a “humanitarian city” (meaning a concentration camp) on the ruins of Rafah, and affirmed the “emigration plan, which will happen,” that is, total ethnic cleansing of the territory.

Not content with destroying Gaza, Israeli settlers on the West Bank are confronting Palestinians, killing many, destroying Palestinian homes and expelling people from villages to build new Israeli settlements, and the army has raided refugee camps. Genocide against the Palestinian masses is the reality of Israel’s action in Gaza and the West Bank.

The U.S. is Netanyahu’s partner in these atrocities. Trump said nothing when U.S. citizen Sayfollah Musallet was murdered near Ramallah by Israeli settlers, who blocked an ambulance for three hours, ensuring his death. It brought to mind the 2022 murder of U.S. citizen and journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, shot in the head by an Israeli soldier in the Jenin refugee camp, also on the West Bank. The Biden administration’s investigation found that she was killed intentionally but it covered up the finding and never held Israel to account. Subsequently, the soldier who killed Abu Akleh was promoted and her picture was used in IDF target practice. That was one of many targeted killings of journalists by the IDF, especially in Gaza over the last two years—as well as targeted killings of medical and rescue workers.

It is not only the U.S. but every powerful nation-state that is complicit, from the European Union supplying weapons, to China, as Israel’s biggest trading partner and supplier of surveillance technology used also to repress the Uyghurs; from Russia, a major supplier of oil, to Egypt, which helps maintain the blockade of Gaza.

Netanyahu’s drive for full authoritarian rule—political and personal—has meant military actions in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen as well as Gaza, the West Bank and Iran.

Another tragedy is that Hamas’ murder of civilians, taking hostages and killing many of them has helped decimate what used to be a large and vibrant peace movement among Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians. And though it is much smaller, it still exists, in the face of physical violence, arrests, doxxing, shunning, and slander. For example, human rights activist Avishay Mohar was beaten and nearly killed by masked settlers because he was documenting their violent expulsion of Palestinians from the village of Mughayyir al-Deir on the West Bank.

Even so, the struggle is growing again in the face of the unimaginable horrors committed in the name of all Israelis and Jews:

• Up to 100,000 army reservists have refused to show up for service. The most radical among them cite the mass killing in Gaza and the West Bank as their primary reason. Some 41 Israeli military intelligence officers wrote that they will no longer participate in combat operations in the “unnecessary, eternal war” in Gaza.
  
• Six hundred Israelis marched along the Gaza border May 18 calling for an end to the war. Nine were arrested trying to block the army’s road into Gaza. A smaller group set out from Tel Aviv June 4 to march 40 miles to the Gaza border, declaring, “We are marching because the destruction, starvation, and abandonment must stop.”
  
• On Holocaust Memorial Day, April 24, three Holocaust survivors protested at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem. They held a sign referring to Gaza: “If we have lost our compassion for the other, we have lost our humanity.” On that day in Tel Aviv, descendants of Holocaust survivors were among the thousands who gathered in a protest the police had tried to ban. They dressed in black and held photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza, or held empty pots representing the starvation imposed there intentionally.
  
• In May, the student chapter of Standing Together at the University of Haifa was suspended after several students sat silently for 10 minutes in a campus building on April 23 with photos of children killed in Gaza.

Internationally, solidarity with Palestinians is widespread, from the college campus encampments in the U.S. and Europe to the Global March to Gaza to the Freedom Flotilla, where participant Greta Thunberg declared: “If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist.”

At the same time, the racist, apartheid/colonial character of Israeli society has nurtured a fascist element that dominates politics and the media to such an extent that a majority supports ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, according to a recent poll. Yes, Hamas is a horror—so much so that many Palestinians have turned against them—but so is Netanyahu. The weaponization of accusations of antisemitism for political purposes by both Netanyahu and Trump is a great danger for Jewish people worldwide. Israelis need to uproot their present government and seriously take up the question of the lives and rights of two peoples—Palestinians and Israelis.

We need also to focus on the Palestinian masses’ actions, which historically have often been independent of, and in opposition to, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. The first Intifada was neither instigated nor controlled by either. Authentic self-determination of the Palestinian people arising amid the carnage and genocide is what Netanyahu and Trump fear the most. That is what requires the deepest solidarity, which will not come from the governments of the world’s state powers but must come from below.

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[1] These statements were quoted in “From Below: Iranian Civil Society Against War and Tyranny” by Siyavash Shahabi.