By CARLOS SAPIR
UPDATE: Soon after Israel began its military attack on Iran in mid-June, it was joined by the U.S., which conducted direct airstrikes against alleged nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran on June 21. An older article follows below. Please look for our commentary on these developments in future articles.
Since June 13, Israel has been carrying out a brazen military offensive, striking both civilian and military targets across Iran. In the face of this aggression by a state with the full military backing of the imperialist U.S., Iran has both the right and obligation to fight back. In doing so, it opens a new front in the war against the Zionist occupation and genocide being carried out against Palestinians.
Thus far, Iran and Israel have traded multiple aerial strikes daily, with Israel flying U.S. F-35s over Iranian airspace as Iran strikes back with barrages of missiles breaking through Israel’s air defenses and inflicting casualties as well. The exact extent of damage in Israel is unclear at the moment, due to the military censorship obstructing reporting and the lack of sustained Iranian aerial presence over Israel that could identify and confirm strikes. Nevertheless, the partial reporting obtained through social media suggests that this is the most damaging bombardment that the Zionist state has ever experienced, an occurrence that many Israelis likely thought was impossible thanks to Israeli propaganda regarding their air-defense systems.
It remains to be seen whether the Israeli military will be able to use this assault to consolidate its position, or whether the pressure of Iranian missile strikes will crack the Israeli population’s willingness to support their government’s endless, futile wars. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that Israel’s brazen actions are carried out with the full complicity of the U.S. government, underscoring the urgent need to break U.S. support for Israel once and for all.
NATO’s nuclear hegemony
In the immediate aftermath of Israel’s first volleys against Iran, Israel’s aggression was met with diplomatic statements from countries such as France that defended Israel’s actions, even committing to dedicating their military to defending Israel’s home front in the case of a wider Iranian counter attack. On June 16, the Group of Seven imperialist nations, meeting in Canada, issued a statement expressing full support for Israel in the conflict while labeling Iran as “the principal” source of instability and terror in the Middle East. This was despite the fact that the same countries had a week earlier been threatening Israel with sanctions for its genocide in Gaza, a crime against humanity that Israel continues to commit unabated. How is this possible?
The international reactions to Israel’s surprise attack and the Iranian response largely follow their positions regarding the protection of NATO states’ nuclear hegemony. Countries favorable to the continued imperialist dominance of NATO states’ nuclear arsenals support Israel, while countries opposed to this hegemony recognize Israel’s aggression as a threat. France itself is a key benefactor of this status quo, controlling the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and thus it supports the Israeli military offensive, as it protects its own imperialist edge. This is a higher priority for the imperialists than the genocide in Gaza.
While French president Macron’s overnight transformation from an Israel critic to a pledged defender of Israeli territory is illustrative of how Israel has counterintuitively used further aggression to win a diplomatic reprieve, it is of course the U.S. that is the imperialist state most directly complicit in these attacks. In addition to the ongoing military and logistical support that the U.S. provides to Israel, without which Israel would not have an operational air force, the U.S. has used its diplomatic clout to maneuver Iran into exposing its military assets as part of supposed nuclear disarmament negotiations.
While hypocritically warning Iran that any attacks on U.S. assets will be met with fierce retaliation, Trump rushed to take credit for Israel’s attack, saying “we knew everything.” After making a quick exit from the G-7 meeting, Trump took an even harder tone, stating that he was no longer “much in the mood to negotiate” with Iran. In posts to social media on June 17, Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran and said that the United States knows where Iran’s supreme leader is but won’t kill him, “at least not for now.”
Iran’s contradictory role
While Israeli aggression has forced Iran to fight back against the forces of imperialism, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a principled ally of political liberation in general, nor even of Palestine in particular. While Iran’s religious leaders have consistently offered rhetorical support for Palestinian liberation, they propped up the Assad regime in Syria—which brutally repressed Palestinians in exile, quietly tolerated Zionist occupation of the Golan, and collaborated with U.S. imperialism in its “War on Terror,” facilitating “extraordinary rendition” (prolonged detention and torture) in its territory. In Iraq, they have directly coordinated and collaborated with the U.S. to bomb the country into submission and reinforce sectarian division. In Ukraine they have abetted Russian imperialism, providing firepower for the Russian arsenal. And domestically they have butchered leftists and fiercely repressed women and ethnic minorities.
Nevertheless, despite all of these historical crimes, it is all of Iran that is under attack by imperialism, and the Islamic Republic is correctly taking up the fight to defend itself and its people. A regime change under the aegis of Israeli bombardment and imperialist pressure can only result in the further subordination of the people of Iran, and must be opposed. The original dream of the 1979 revolution—a socialist, democratic, liberated Iran—can only be brought about by the self-activity of the Iranian masses, not by an imperialist bombing campaign aimed at crippling the country’s military capacity. For Iran and for the region as a whole, it is the defeat and dissolution of the constant military threat that is Israel, and the retreat of imperialism from the region, that will open the road to liberation.
Now more than ever: End U.S. aid to Israel!
Ending U.S. aid to Israel was already a vital demand in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the ongoing genocide that it is committing. With Israel now spreading war elsewhere, and leaning even more heavily on U.S. logistical and diplomatic support to do so, this demand has only become more urgent. With the possibility of the U.S. military stepping in directly, it is vital for socialists, antiwar activists, and all other supporters of Palestinian liberation to mobilize demonstrations denouncing the ongoing U.S. support for Israeli war.
Such mobilizations will begin to put pressure on the U.S. government to reconsider its posture, but even more importantly, they will help educate the broader public of working people about the nature of both the Israeli attacks and their backing from U.S. imperialism, and organize the public into a force that can act for itself to stop war production bound for Israel, irrespective of imperialist politicians’ opinions. This is not a struggle limited to the U.S., but rather an international one, with activists everywhere able to build public pressure against Israel’s warmongering, isolating the Israeli apartheid state and building a conscious global movement against it.
Massive mobilizations have already been organized, with over 100,000 people rallying at The Hague in the Netherlands over the weekend. These build on other efforts to draw attention to the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza and the West Bank. In order to free Palestine, the Israeli war machine must be stopped.
Hands off Iran! Hands off Palestine! End U.S. aid to Israel now!
Photo: A firefighter works in a residential building in Tehran destroyed by Israeli bombing on June 13. (Morteza Nikoubazi / NurPhoto / Reuters)