Zionism and U.S. hegemony are doomed to keep declining; this means that the decisive question of the 21st century is how the anti-imperialist bloc will choose to usher in the post-American era. Will the powers which challenge the U.S. refrain from serious military action against the USA and the Zionist entity? Or will they take on a more proactive role, and commit to defeating these genocidal regimes by any means necessary? The latter option does not have to entail any reckless behavior; it would merely look like a continuation of the path that Iran is presently on, wherein it’s intervening against the entity with calculated restraint. The same is true for Russia, which fully committed to the path of resistance when it acted to rescue the Donbass from Banderite terror. As these countries have continued with their anti-imperialist wars, the decisive question’s answer has become clearer.
Choosing resistance
The Zionist state is inexorably headed for collapse. So to defeat it, all Iran needs to do is keep striking “Israel” in ways that expose its security deficiencies; this causes ever more colonizers to leave Palestine out of fear, and further exacerbates the Zionist economy’s unraveling. Anyone who’s paying attention to the present trends knows that a Palestinian state is coming, and when it emerges, what remains of the “Israeli” settler state won’t be able to sustain itself. To help bring about this outcome, Iran only has to keep wearing down the Zionist project’s morale through these limited retaliatory acts, which have a great psychological impact and therefore a great material impact.
Yet until “Israel” is fully gone, it will keep trying to murder as many people as possible, and so will the U.S. empire for as long as it exists. The peoples within Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and all other vulnerable places must be defended with maximum effort. For U.S. Americans, this means resisting our government’s facilitation of the Zionist genocides; for the anti-imperialist states, it means doing everything in their power to ensure the success of the anti-Zionist resistance. Sooner or later, every corner of Palestine will become free. The thing we don’t know yet is how many innocent lives the Zionists and the imperialists will be allowed to take until then.
This depends on the actions of all the globe’s anti-imperialist forces, including the ones in the imperial center. With this essay, I don’t just aim to investigate the ways in which countries like Iran could make a difference; I also intend to look at the role that U.S. Americans like myself have in this fight. I understand that the struggles taking place in these other countries are not the front which I’m in proximity to, and anti-imperialists in my part of the world need to take responsibility for our own business. It’s necessary for all anti-imperialists to deepen our understanding of the present situation in west Asia, though, because there are certain realities about it that would be irresponsible to ignore.
The thing I’ve discovered from recent events is that there are certain forces within Iran, given more power by the assassinations of hardliners, which have been working to turn Iran in a U.S.-friendly direction. With the martyrdom of Nasrallah, though, Iran’s people have mobilized against these capitulationist policies, and the reformists have been sidelined.
In my last several writings, I’ve reacted to this with much optimism, concluding that Iran can now be relied upon to prosecute the rest of this liberation war. Will the next events show that I wasn’t fully right about this? I’m prepared to admit it if I’m proven wrong about anything. The important thing is not that all of our hopes get vindicated all the time; the important thing is that we respond to each new development in a way that best advances the struggle. And if the capitulationists do still pose a threat, the logical thing is to lean upon the anti-imperialist struggle’s areas of strength; which can be found within the power of the masses, not just in Iran but throughout the globe.
Within the powerful Eurasian states, it was inevitable that this ideological debate would emerge; that one side would merely be satisfied with passively taking advantage of the globe’s economic shifts, while the other side would want to take this process to the next step, and defeat the imperial beast. The east was going to rise at some point, but within the east there are forces which seek to end imperialism and forces that want to appease it. The faction represented by Iran’s president Pezeshkian believes that the country can peacefully coexist with Washington; so do the liberals within Russia who wish that the Ukraine operation had never happened, and the most U.S.-friendly elements inside the Communist Party of China.
In China, these liberal forces lost the debate when Washington began its new cold war provocations against the PRC. In Russia, they lost when the Ukraine action started. In Iran they just lost a lot of influence, and might not be able to recover. An important factor is the direction that the other BRICS countries are going to take in relation to Palestine, because Iran’s government doesn’t want to do anything that could jeopardize its success with BRICS. And this makes Iran all the more likely to commit to resistance, because assisting Palestine and Lebanon is essential for its economic success.
Pezeshkian’s camp acts as if retaliating would hurt Iran’s standing within BRICS, yet the imperialists view Pezeshkian’s capitulationism as useful towards undermining the grouping. A U.S.-friendly Iran would put BRICS at risk of unraveling, which is another reason why the hardliners have decisively won this round within the ideological fight. Iran just ended all nuclear negotiations with the United States; this means the reformers won’t get their wish of restoring the Iran nuclear deal, nor many of the other things they want.
This month’s BRICS summit will now certainly be a victory for de-dollarization efforts, and thereby for the anti-imperialist cause. Mao warned that the reactionaries will never put down their weapons, though, and will keep trying to do harm for as long as they exist. So we need to prepare for the empire’s next maneuver, which will be to expand and intensify its present genocides. In the short term, the enemy is going to encourage “Israel” to bomb more, using the Zionist entity’s exchanges with Iran as an excuse to keep providing weapons for these atrocity campaigns. In the longer term, it’s going to do all it can to murder the people of the Global South. Blinken has privately said that if a Palestinian state is created, the U.S. will cut off funding for the UN’s World Food Program, which would lead to starvation across the formerly colonized countries.
This project to effectively sanction the whole “third world” will exacerbate the effects of global warming, creating more openings for regime change projects like the one Washington just carried out in Bangladesh. As the hegemon works to implement its plan for a new wave of color revolutions, it will also try to make Gaza into the new normal; to apply the same model of collective punishment that it’s now inflicting upon those who’ve challenged Zionism. For this plan to work, the targets of the empire’s attacks will need to be divided. And as is shown by the some of the empire’s most recent psyops, the efforts at stoking divisions will be accompanied by efforts to sell false solutions; to paint those who aid the genocide as friends of the Palestinians.
Working to divide Zionism’s enemies
Something the imperialists understand quite well, and anti-imperialists in the United States need to understand better, is how “America vs. America’s enemies” isn’t the only conflict which exists in the world. It’s the primary global conflict, but there are numerous other fights, and many of these fights are far older than the United States. It’s this reality that the hegemon is working to exploit. And its present goal with this project is to gain an opportunity for bringing vast new death and destruction.
I need to be careful in how I talk about these conflicts, for risk of acting like I know things that I lack the experience to know. But something I’m certain of is that there’s a great amount of unity among Sunnis and Shiites on the question of supporting Iran. There are sectarians who seek to stoke anti-Iran sentiment, and turn Palestine supporters against the Islamic Republic; but they’re not among the people who’ve established themselves as credible contributors to the resistance.
The division-mongers are not like Hamas, a Sunni organization that has a resilient bond with Iran and that’s successfully waging guerrilla war against the occupation. There have been times when their religious differences have led to tensions between the groups, but the reality of today is that they’ve worked to mend their ties, and that Hamas is cheering on what Iran is doing. It’s said that “We congratulate the heroic rocket launch carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran, on large areas of our occupied territories, in response to the occupation's continuing crimes against the peoples of the region, and in retaliation for the blood of our nation’s heroic martyrs.” This goodwill goes both ways; following Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad confirmed that Iran approved of the October 7 resistance action.
It’s so important to understand these things because if we’re not literate about the religious and historical context of west Asia, or know about how the Axis of Resistance has unified different groups, then we’ll be vulnerable to the destructive propaganda which our enemies are putting forth. Last week Shahid Bolsen, a commentator on Arab affairs who has a notable platform, posted a video called “Iran and the Axis of Assistance.” It promoted the idea that not just the Pezeshkian faction, but also the Khamenei faction, exist to serve “Israel.”
Bolsen asserts that Iran has taken advantage of the existence of “Israel” to advance a sectarian war, that Iran has provided only token support for Hamas, and that Hezbollah’s primary function has been to kill Sunnis. All of these claims are nonsense; Iran has needed to overcome great obstacles to get aid to Hamas, which exists inside a closed-off concentration camp, and if Hezbollah were so sectarian then it wouldn’t be in a coalition with Hamas. These accusations fit with the false view of Hamas being promoted by other voices, which is that Hamas works merely as an extension of the “Israeli” counterinsurgency.
This narrative ignores how Hamas, since the time when Netanyahu viewed it as the preferable political leadership in Gaza, has taken on a role which now makes it purely a threat towards Zionism; Hamas has entered into a coalition with the Palestinian communists and nationalists, which means opposing Hamas equates to opposing the whole Palestinian resistance. Since then, thanks to the inter-Palestinian negotiations held by China, Hamas has also united with Palestine’s broader factions. Netanyahu’s plan to use Hamas as a tool for sabotaging peace efforts has backfired, bringing a scenario where “Israel” is losing against the resistance coalition.
These pieces of context discredit the arguments from those who seek to divide Palestinians, or who put forth the idea that there are no good sides in this fight. Whether it’s Bolsen ostensibly supporting Hamas while smearing Iran and Hezbollah; or others speaking positively about Iran while portraying Hamas as controlled opposition; the effect is to aid Palestine’s enemies.
As faulty as these arguments are, they’ve been given power by the actions of Pezeshkian’s camp. This camp’s betrayal of Nasrallah has created an opportunity for actors who seek to create fissures and distrust within the struggle. The timing of Bolsen’s statement in particular is highly suspicious, because it’s clear that the ideological forces he represents are trying to exploit the pain from Nasrallah’s murder. And it’s clear that the Arab monarchies are supporting this propaganda campaign. Everything Bolsen says is informed by the worldview of the Gulf states, which seek to advertise themselves as building a great civilization for the Arab world; Bolsen praises these states for constructing an “empire” that will supposedly defeat Zionism through sheer diplomatic power. This thinking mirrors the idealism of the Pezeshkian faction, with its notion about ending imperialism’s violence using negotiations.
Bolsen’s argument is that the Abraham Accords are actually a good thing for the Palestinian cause; according to him, they’ll make “Israel” dependent on the Arab world, giving the Gulf states leverage that will free Palestine. And because Bolsen predicts in the “Axis of Assistance” video that Iran will likely normalize relations with “Israel” within the next five years, this narrative implies that Arabs must unite behind the Gulf monarchies so they can be the ones to define the region’s future. It’s a view that’s divisive not just religiously, but also ethnically, because Bolsen concludes that west Asia’s larger conflict is one between Persians and Arabs. He says that every other force in the region besides these ones are only “transient,” which means Persians and Arabs are destined to be at odds. It’s true that these other forces have a transient role, but this does not necessarily equate to the indigenous forces remaining in conflict; that future is the wish of actors like the Saudis, who hope to hold on to power through endless wars after the U.S. falls.
This rivalistic ideology, which the Saudis and the UAE hope to propagate as much as possible, is just one among many types of confusion that Palestine’s fake friends seek to spread. At this moment, all of the actors which are most complicit in the genocide are trying to portray themselves as pro-Palestine. The Democrats, the Saudis, Erdogan, and Jordan’s king have been saying they want the killing to stop, while continuing to assist it. And to keep up the narrative that they’re allies of the Palestinians, they must discredit the forces which are truly advancing the anti-Zionist struggle. They work to paint Iran, Russia, China, and organizations like Hezbollah as bad-faith actors, with each accusation they make being a confession.
The Saudis are guilty of everything Bolsen says Iran does. He claims that Iran has worked to “destabilize” the region, placed sectarianism over solidarity, and been insincere in supporting Palestine, which perfectly describes Saudi Arabia’s role. The Saudis have provided direct military assistance to “Israel,” which is part of why Netanyahu has categorized the Gulf states as “the blessed.” These Saudi and UAE psyops have the goal of alienating Palestine supporters from Iran, and the other Axis of Resistance members. The horrors we’re seeing in Gaza and Lebanon have potential to make more people susceptible to these psyops, but such “shock and awe” demoralization methods have limits.
Everyone who’s connected to the reality of our situation can see that Iran is a true ally, that Hamas is a friend of Iran, that the broader anti-imperialist bloc represents hope. They’ll continue to struggle against the empire in unison, however much violence the empire decides to unleash.
A left-wing imperial triumphalism
The Gulf state psyops that the empire has been promoting, with their narratives about how the entire resistance is secretly fake, aren’t the primary type of imperial propaganda. But they do reinforce the larger narrative the hegemon wants to push, which is that there’s no such thing as solid truth. According to philosophical irrationalism, the driving belief of our ruling class, anything can be true because everything is subjective. From this nihilistic worldview has emerged another ideology, one which the ruling class is now promoting above all others; this is the ideology of left-wing neoconservatism.
The neocon mission, in which the world must be reshaped by any means necessary, comes from the idea that unlimited military intervention is the answer. If the universe is irrational, and humanity is doomed to keep experiencing chaos, then according to neoconservatism the solution is endless war; which is contradictory to their triumphalist attitude, but every aspect of liberal ideologies is contradictory. The neocons will never run out of justifications for inserting themselves into the affairs of other countries, because their ideology is about fighting a conflict that can’t ever be conclusively won. And there’s a left-wing version of this thinking; one that’s motivated by a desire to make every country socially progressive by the standards of U.S. culture.
This is where the “pro-Palestine, anti-Russia” position comes from: a view in which the present global conflict is not one between imperialism and its enemies, but between what’s leftist and what’s “reactionary.” According to this reasoning, Russia’s rescue mission in the Donbass shouldn’t be supported just because the Russian government is socially conservative. It’s this type of thinking that represents the future of U.S. imperialism’s narratives, because it’s an ideology that can continue to promote imperialist goals in a post-Zionist world.
When Palestine becomes free, the same liberals who worked to continue the genocide will be saying that they were pro-Palestine all along. And they’ll use this image of humanitarian virtue to position themselves against Russia, China, Iran, or whatever other U.S. targets. This is how the U.S. will sell its efforts to punish the Global South for the demise of Zionism: by retroactively claiming to have always been a friend of Palestine, while attacking everyone who supported Palestine during its liberation struggle. When the U.S. sabotages the World Food Program, or employs whatever other methods it may use to enact these global sanctions, it may claim that this has nothing to do with the Palestinian state; it could try to deflect the blame onto its adversaries, and say the starvation is their doing.
These manipulations will work on the minority who’ve embraced the liberal interventionist dogmas. Even though these anti-imperialist countries have been the ones materially supporting Palestine’s struggle, within the liberal worldview they’re seen as imperialist, fascist, “authoritarian,” and so forth. So the left-wing neocons will narratively assist all of the destabilization efforts that Washington next directs towards the anti-imperialist bloc, while claiming this position can be reconciled with supporting Palestine. Because within this worldview, Palestine is not its own nation, with its own voices, culture, and agency. Palestine exists only in proximity to American leftism, and will surely join with the U.S. left in attacking these countries.
This view is going to collide with reality, because it’s only logical for the future Palestinian state to befriend the same countries that made its existence possible. Which means Washington will be kicked out of west Asia when Zionism falls; its remaining Asian front will be in the east, where it’s preparing to start a war with China.
For the time being, though, Iran is the USA’s greatest adversary according to Kamala Harris. This is because Iran represents the biggest obstacle to the effort at preserving Zionism. Washington is letting the Gaza and Lebanon genocides continue because opposing them would mean turning off the support for “Israel,” which the hegemon wants to save by any means necessary. When “Israel” is gone, Eurasia will be lost to the imperialists; the decision by Iran and Russia to take a path of active resistance has ensured that the balance of power can never again shift in imperialism’s favor, and that a post-Zionism world will be a post-American world. The empire is reacting to this existential peril by going on the offensive, and taking as many lives as it can.
We within the core must do the equivalent of what our global allies have done, and prepare to overthrow the state we live under. Left neoconservatism is an aggressive enemy, but like all the other ideological tools of our ruling class, it’s beatable through the right methods. The imperial state is using this ideology both to justify repression against anti-imperialists, and to cultivate counter-gangs among the radical elements of liberalism. It aims to overwhelm us by taking away our platforms and our ability to organize, while weaponizing ultra-leftist groups that view us as the enemy. These are the elements that view communists as fascists because we support Russia’s action, and because we don’t promote liberal idpol. Right now, violent Zionists represent the main kind of vigilante threat towards our movement; as this power struggle intensifies, the state will use the most sectarian parts of the left to assist these Zionists in their assaults.
As organizers, we can’t respond to this by letting paranoia define us, but we must be vigilant. Lately I’ve been trying to strive more towards non-sectarianism, since I know how damaging sectarianism is in general; I know you need to organize with the people who are available to you. But I won’t try to win over people who’ve already made up their minds that I’m their enemy; I’ll defend from whatever tactics they use, and so will those who are with me in this struggle.
We’re now at a stage where the voices which consistently oppose imperialism are getting silenced at an ever-more rapid pace, and where our government is preparing to go after any org that so much as speaks out for Palestine. An unprecedented opportunity exists for mobilizing the masses, and we will be able to overthrow our imperialist dictatorship if we can survive the next attacks. Beyond preparing to defend from the counter-gangs, we have to build cadres and networks that could keep operating if they have to exist underground. We need to cultivate a solid center of local people who can take on a Bolshevik role, where you dedicate your life to the revolutionary task.
As important as our international connections are, the connections we make in our communities are the most important, because they’re what can save us. As our global allies work to weaken the imperial state, we must construct our own vehicle for defeating the enemy. It’s our responsibility both to the people within this country, and to the ones abroad who have no defense against our government’s rampage.
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