Iran, long patient in the face of the genocidal zionist regime’s provocations, finally struck back against Israeli terror on 1 October, sending a barrage of missiles against Israeli air bases, intelligence centres and missile silos.
This action, greeted with joy across the middle east, and especially in besieged Palestine, was not an ‘aggression’, as presented by western politicians and media, but a defensive and very restrained reaction.
Legendary Iranian leader General Qasem Soleimani, legendary Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh, legendary Lebanese leaders Hassan Nasrallah and Foad Shukr. These are just a few of the world leaders murdered by the assassin apartheid state in recent weeks.
Having murdered 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza over the last year alone, the zionist terrorists have in a single week displaced one million Lebanese, and are doing their best with their rain of bombs to turn Lebanon into a second Gaza.
In the course of their vicious assassination of Hezbollah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the zionists and their imperialist backers ‘heroically’ vaporised an entire Beirut neighbourhood, using eighty-six US-supplied 2,000lb bunker-buster bombs to demolish entire blocks of flats and reach a single ‘target’. A thousand innocent civilians were the ‘collateral damage’ of this brave operation.
Civilians whose annihilation was not thought worthy of a mention by gloating politicians and commentators in the west.
No regional government, no Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese or Yemeni, no Arab, no Iranian who is not prepared to live under the permanent threat of death, or in conditions of abject slavery, can live with Israel as its neighbour. Even the CIA – conscious of its proxy’s crimes – has long known this and predicted Israel’s fall in the coming period.
While their rulers may smirk, temporarily buoyed up, workers of all countries are united in condemnation of zionism’s colonial atrocities.
The highest United Nations court, the ICJ, which convicted Israel of genocide, stands itself convicted of passivity and inaction; of a complete failure to override the Anglo-American imperialists and their regional proxy. As a result, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to be messianic in his promotion of a fascist vision of destroying all of his neighbours in pursuit of a “greater Israel”.
As he launches yet another colonial war, he talks sickeningly of Iranian and Lebanese submission – and “peace”. But the peace he offers Iranians is the peace of the grave.
Starmer ‘responds’
Meanwhile, prime minister Keir Starmer’s ‘statement’ condemning Iran’s missile strike on Israel was a deliberately constructed edifice of lies, based on a systemic and historical assumption of the colonial rights – and historical assumption of the colonial rights – and, indeed, past crimes – of his imperialist masters.
The truth is diametrically opposed to this statement, however.
First, it must be pointed out that Iran launched its retaliatory strike (having shown great restraint for months despite repeated provocations by Israel, including repeated bombings and numerous high-level assassinations) on military, not civilian targets.
Second, we must ask: who exactly are the “innocent Israelis” that Sir Keir is so concerned about? Israel has murdered upwards of 200,000 Palestinians over the past year, in an ongoing genocide in which almost every Israeli adult has participated. And it has now launched a war on Lebanon displacing one million civilians and murdering thousands more. Where was Sir Keir’s condemnation of these Israeli crimes? What has he done to stop them taking place with British bombs and air support?
Third, it is Israel and Netanyahu that are escalating and pushing for a regional war. They are doing so with US and British backing of every kind – including this sickening statement from the British Labour imperialists. Netanyahu is escalating because Israel is losing its war against the Palestinian people, and the only path he sees to ‘victory’ is one that will involve his imperialist masters directly, bringing in US and European forces to do the fighting for him.
In fact, there is no path to victory for the zionist-imperialist cabal. The workers of the USA and Europe will not fight for this bankrupt cause. The fascists that the imperial gang raised in Ukraine are getting their just desserts and are showing what will be the fate of any who are drawn down that poisoned path.
Starmer does not speak for the British people
Fourth, we, the British people and especially British workers, do not stand with Israel. We do not recognise the zionist butchers’ actions as ‘self-defence’. On the contrary, it is clear to us that Israel is fighting a genocidal and colonial war on behalf of the zionists’ ‘right’ to live in a supremacist, apartheid state. On behalf of the ‘right’ of the Nato imperialists to colonise and loot the entire middle east – to extract its oil and keep its labour power in the most abject conditions of superexploitation.
Fifth, Israel has no right to demand ‘security’ for itself alone. True security is indivisible. If there is no security of life and limb for the Palestinian and wider Arab and middle-eastern (indeed global) population; if Israeli settler-colonialism has arrogated to itself the right to murder hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, dismissing all its innocent victims as “terrorists” and “subhuman”, it has forfeited any reasonable claim to ‘security’ for its own adherents.
Those decent Israelis who stand against the genocidal actions of their government are free to leave Israel, or to join the political and military resistance that is today facing Israel’s fascist rulers. Just as the white population of South Africa were free to join the struggle against the fascist apartheid regime. Just as German workers were free to join the fight against the Nazis.
Let us note in passing that those who are willing to stand up in this way are a tiny proportion of the population – precisely because the entire project of Israel is to establish a racist settler-colonial and therefore supremacist base for imperialism in the region. That century-long project has yielded the bitter fruit of modern-day Israel.
Those Israelis who stand with the crimes of their regime are complicit in its actions; they are not innocent. They are belligerents. Armed and ideologically committed to ethnically cleansing first ‘Greater Israel’ (Palestine) and then to expanding relentlessly and waging a perpetual war on their neighbours. As belligerents in an illegal occupation and aggressive war, as perpetrators of a heinous genocide, they have no rights except for the right to cease their crimes and make reparations.
The Palestinian and Arab masses, on the other hand, have the right to self-defence as enshrined in UN resolutions, international law, and their own innate humanity. And this includes the right to bear arms. To deny them this right, the right to defend and liberate themselves, is to deny them their humanity.
Repression cannot hold back the tide of liberation
In any event, they are not asking for our blessing! Britain may pass laws against the groups that invoke their right to bear arms. It may pass laws such as the Terrorism Act 2000 and countless more, which give its ministers the right to proscribe freedom fighters by the stroke of a pen – and to repress British workers who stand with the righteous cause of Palestine, of national-liberation and of freedom from tyranny of the world’s peoples, without which any dream of freedom or socialism for British workers will never be realised.
But those laws are themselves illegal – just as the British imperialists’ real military, diplomatic, financial, press propaganda and ‘moral’ support to the Israeli genocide are not only totally immoral and bankrupt but also illegal.
By their complicity, the Anglo-American imperialists show themselves to be the true agents of this genocide and war. Their hollow words of condemnation rebound upon themselves.
And lastly, what is the benefit of Starmer’s having conducted a ring-round of the likes of Prime Minister Netanyahu, King Hussein of Jordan, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany? What purpose is served by ‘talking with’ the impotent Prime Minister Najib Makati of Lebanon and the comprador Palestinian ‘President’ Mahmoud Abbas?
Starmer can ‘speak with’ his imperialist co-conspirators and their colonial servants till he is blue in the face, but the rising tide of history will overturn the little skiff they are sailing in. The turbulent waters of the storm that is brewing will wreck his little Labour imperialist regime.
Today, British and US politicians are drunk on power, claiming that no middle-eastern resistance fighter or leader is safe from their reach. But he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.
There is a global shift in world power; a shift away from the Nato butchers and their colonial servants. This is the underlying problem Starmer and his masters cannot face and cannot avert.
A better world is in birth. Imperialism is causing great pain and suffering across the world, but the masses are already rising to the challenge of sweeping it away.
We are confident that despite the apparent challenges, despite our rulers’ arrogant belief in the eternity of their ‘security’ to issue such outrageous statements, workers in Britain will rise to the challenge and play their part in bringing the whole rotten edifice crashing down.
Victory to the Axis of Resistance!
