What are the facts of the US war against the Iranian people? First, you should know a little bit about the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its relations with the US; the Iranians certainly do. Public memory in the US usually begins with the 1979 hostage crisis. Iranian memory goes back quite a bit further.

In 1921, a cavalry officer named Reza Khan led a coup backed by the United Kingdom and overthrew the Qajar Dynasty of Persia. After World War II, the US started its Cold War against the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In 1951, the people of Iran elected Mohammad Mossaddegh as their Prime Minister. He embarked on a program of nationalization of the Iranian oil fields, which had until then been controlled by and for the profit of a British firm, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation.

The United Kingdom wanted to invade Iran to secure to oil. After all, the entire global economy had switched over to running on oil by 1951 and every Western military power needed oil to run their war machines. They couldn’t let Iran decide who to sell oil to. They might pick the wrong people! US president Harry Truman convinced the British not to act. At the same time, US diplomats assured the Mossaddegh government that the US was their staunch ally. Behind the scenes, the US was preparing to move against Mossaddegh because the US ruling class was afraid that the Soviets might get their hands on Iranian oil.

In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence agents from MI6 orchestrated a coup. They had the Shah issue arrest orders to detain and arrest Mossaddegh and the cabinet of ministers. The initial coup failed and Mossaddegh rallied the masses of Iran to his side. The US sheltered fleeing army officers in CIA stations across Iran, then unleashed them to counter Mossaddegh. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The Shah needed to shore up his position, since his people despised him for what he had done to their elected champion. So, the US provided the Shah with a nuclear program. They bulked up the Iranian army with massive US weapons sales: the Shah was authorized to purchase almost any non-nuclear US weapons system, and spent over $4.3 billion on sales from the US in 1974. Most importantly, though, the CIA built the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK. They trained this brutal force and, under CIA tutelage, SAVAK tortured and murdered political dissidents until the Shah was overthrown.

In 1979, after nearly three decades of abuse, the people of Iran rose up against the Pahlavi monarchy. They were led by a coalition of Communists, socialists, and Islamic revolutionaries. The revolution in Iran took on an Islamic character because mosques were one of the few places where people could organize without being dragged away by the Shah’s secret police. Islam in Iran thus took on a revolutionary role, rather than a reactionary one such as in Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Republic today is a Parliamentary Republic with a unique element: the role of the velayat-e-faqih, or the oversight of a political “guardian” and jurist of the faith – the “Supreme Leader” of Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (the IRGC you may have heard about recently) is a secular branch of the Republican government. Uppermost in the political philosophy of every branch of the Islamic Republic is the principle that the Iranian people should never again be pawns of the Western powers.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been the target of punishing US sanctions. The US has consistently attempted to exert what it calls “maximum pressure” – the same strategy they are applying to Cuba today and that they applied to Chile in the 1970s – to isolate the Iranian economy. This has resulted in countless deaths, and subjected everyone in Iran to collective punishment for daring to overthrow the US-installed dictatorship.

The Fight Against the zionists

The crimes committed by the zionist state in Palestine are not new, but their full extent has only now become undeniable to the US public. Since it was declared, the Islamic Republic has been opposed to the continuing genocide committed by the zionists and has worked tirelessly to assist the Palestinian resistance. This, more than anything else, has been the reason for the continued hostility of the US ruling class against Iran.

The US requires its forward base in the zionist territory for several reasons. It is the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of US power projection. It keeps the Gulf vassal stats like Saudi Arabia in line, ensures that oil can continue to flow, operates as a relief valve for domestic US class-strife, and helps the totally enmeshed US-zionist tech and computer economy remain afloat. It is, in essence, an extra “frontier” from which land can be stolen to reward corporate enclaves and individual technical specialists.

In the fight for the freedom of Palestine, the Iranian government has been the strongest ally of the Resistance. In a very real sense, it is impossible to stand up for Palestine without standing against the United States. That includes their aggression against Iran.

Are We the Villains?

The fact of the matter is, from a world-historical perspective – from the perspective of anyone who isn’t a white American – the United States is unequivocally and without question the global “bad guy” and has been since at least the end of World War II. The US government is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world. Everybody other than us already knows this! There is no government the US won’t overthrow in the quest for profit or “containment.” Whatever internal criticisms you have of the Iranian government and how it treats its people, never fear – the US government treats people worse.

Most non-aligned states feel the need to develop nuclear weapons to stop the US from invading them. There’s no need to look back in the history books, just look at how Washington treated the sovereign states of Venezuela and Cuba this year! For what? The acquisition of Venezuelan oil, to cut off the flow of oil to China, and to open up Cuba to American investors and hotel magnates.

But let’s walk through the latest timeline of the US interventions in Iran and try to see if there’s any kind of pattern:

July 2015. A comprehensive nuclear enrichment agreement is reached between Iran, the US, and the UN in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

May 8, 2019. Washington unilaterally repudiates the deal.

Jan 3, 2020. Washington kills Iranian general Qassem Soleimani with a missile strike for the crime of being anti-zionist and Iranian.

March 7, 2025. Washington says they want to restart talks.

April 12, 2025. First round of talks are held between intermedaries.

April 19, 2025. Second round of talks.

April 26, 2025. Third round of talks are held, the first where experts from both sides are present.

May 11, 2025. Fourth round of talks are held.

May 23, 2025. Fifth round of talks are held. Both US and Iran report that there has been progress.

June 13, 2025. The zionists bomb Iran while talks are ongoing.

June 22, 2025. The United States bombs Iran during the talks.

July 25, 2025. Iran and European authorities meet.

Sept. 9, 2025. Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog strike a deal.

Sept 28, 2025. The UN places new sanctions on Iran.

Jan. 13, 2026. Washington calls off all further talks.

Feb. 6, 2026. Washington restarts talks.

Feb. 26, 2026. Washington and Iran may have a deal.

Feb 28, 2026. While talks are ongoing, Washington and the zionists pummel Iran with missiles and kill the Supreme Leader and his wife without warning.

The Islamic Republic negotiated in good faith; it reached a deal not once, but repeatedly and it was purportedly very close to a deal on February 26. Their counterparts in Washington used the cover of talks not once but twice to strike Iran. So, who, then, are the villains here?

We Have the Same Enemies

The US ruling class — the capitalists — who control all government policy, who decide when and where the country goes to war, and who engage in the most hideous acts of pedophilia, rape, abuse, and even murder; those people who set up and run the US economy, who profit from your misery, who set the police on you, who pilfer your wages and retirement funds, who have been turning the screws on their economic vise since before you were born, who crashed the economy in 2008 and got away with it… those people are our enemy. If the people of Iran have grievances against their government, it is their fight to carry out when and how they choose. Right now, the might of the US imperial war machine is bearing down on the Islamic Republic of Iran… and the Islamic Republic is winning. Not on the abstract level of vague principles, but on the very real level of fact, Iran’s resistance to US imperialism is weakening our collective enemy.

We should be overjoyed that our oppressors are being bloodied by their ill-conceived attacks. The US strikes on Iran have not weakened it at all; they have made it stronger, unified the people of Iran, and placed command of the Iranian nation in the hands of the secular IRGC.

Iran is striking our enemies for us, dealing blow after blow to the imperialist economy, exhausting the imperialist war materiel with their strategy, while we sit idly by and do nothing.

It comes down to each of us to begin organizing local circles to support the world war on imperialism that is now being waged. We must gather all sympathetic people in our locality and plan ways to slow down or degrade the war machine that is firing missiles and dropping bombs in our names. As we do this, we must not lose sight of the true enemy; it is also up to each of us to combat the ruling class propaganda that asks you to be thrilled at the drama of a downed US pilot. What was that pilot doing there? Do not forget: the enemy of the world is our enemy too.

The news and the news media determine who gets to be considered “innocent” of crimes. Yet we know the zionist state makes use of “civilians” in order to further its goals. In a time of genocide, even reporters and propagandists can be found guilty under the Genocide Convention, which even the U.S. government claims to recognize (despite its name, the Genocide Convention is an international treaty making genocide an international crime, rather than a convention for genocidaires. One can be forgiven for mistaking it for the latter, however, as the United States, one of the most genocidal states in history, is a proud signatory to the convention. It  became a signatory to the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948). At the Nuremburg trials, those who enabled the genocide were found guilty and executed. The zionist state utilizes Hasbara, the method of propaganda in which state actors, embedded as civilians, lie openly about the actions of the regime to launder its image and erode public trust in Palestinian sources. If the zionist state continues to utilize “civilians” and Hasbara, then we should not expect any citizens who support its genocidal forces to be considered “off limits” to counterterror. 

This trick — claiming colonized people are already guilty — is one that the U.S. imperialists have used for a long time. From Palestine to Sudan, the West has robbed the people of their right to innocence. Ibrahim Traore, president of Burkina Faso, for instance, is said to be a violent tyrant — so the U.S. can plot to assassinate him and pillage his country. Who is really innocent? What are the true crimes? If you listen to the U.S. government, you’ll never know.

There is a cradle of popular revolution rising. The zionist genocide is not merely confined to the borders of the zionist state. In fact, it is a genocide being carried out with the policy protections and active support of the United States government and our ruling class. It is a United States genocide. The United States has determined to expand its military borders to the four corners of the earth; its bases are located throughout the entire world. Its tendrils reach into every economy in every country. In such a case, the front, the frontier, the border, is everywhere. There is no “rear,” there are no “civilian populations.” Take the words of the genocidaires as true: there are those who are for and those who are against it.

“There are no innocent civilians,” according to the zionist embassies.

Every act of resistance builds up friction inside the imperialist machine. It is right and brave to inhibit the empire from carrying out its genocidal tasks. Policy makers and imperial managers must be made to understand that they are not secure. They are not safe behind the walls of a U.S. border. There is no territory, there is no home, that cannot instantly become the frontlines of the fight. Only when the political actors and the ruling, owning, capitalist class realize that they cannot sit safely in their glass and steel towers and derelict the murder and massacre of millions across the globe will they relent, will they pause. For them there are only two considerations: 1) profit, and 2) geopolitical stability. That means the ability of the U.S. empire to continue supporting their businesses abroad and extracting profit. It can all be boiled down to profit and its continuation. If we want our collective voices to be heard, to be louder than the few additional dollars for the U.S. ruling class, then we must amplify them. We cannot speak, we must shout. We cannot talk, we must argue.

There is only one argument the enemy respects.

Up to half of this “aid” has been in the form of shrouds for Palestinian dead, and the remainder has not been distributed. No food or supplies have reached the population since the 2nd of March. Almost everyone inside Gaza is suffering from severe malnutrition, with disease rampant and medical services overwhelmed and under constant bombardment. Over 3,000 people have died in the past two months. Ninety-eight people were killed on Tuesday this week.

They aren’t sending aid.

They’re sending tanks.

A comprehensive invasion is currently ethnically cleansing the strip from north to south. The zionists have established increasingly shrinking “humanitarian zones,” outside of which Palestinians are killed on sight, and have forced the nearly 2 million surviving Palestinians in Gaza into highly concentrated “refugee camps” in the south. The zionist state regularly bombs these refugee camps, resulting in horrific casualties. Since the 15th of May, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, israel’s bombardment of the surviving population of Gaza has intensified to unprecedented levels. Around 100 people are being killed every day by the relentless bombings. 

Every leading scholar on genocide worldwide is calling this what it is, but the mainstream media refuses to report accurately on conditions in Gaza. They refuse to admit that this is an intentionally targeted genocide, being waged with our tax dollars, our “defense” industry, and our complicity. Instead they are under standing orders to continue to run PR for the genocidal zionist occupation of Palestine. The world’s governments continue to make symbolic gestures, denouncing the occupation’s actions in words while continuing to support it in practice..

The United States is the primary beneficiary and driver of this zionist atrocity; all pressure must be exerted on the United States government to cease. This genocide is U.S.-backed, U.S.-funded, and is being carried out with tactical direction from U.S. soldiers.

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY IN THE ZIONIST HOLOCAUST.

Immediate action is desperately needed on all fronts:

Arms shipments to the zionist occupation of Palestine must be stopped immediately. Visit workersinpalestine.org/who-arms-israel for a list of weapons companies involved in materially enabling the genocide.

Relief is desperately needed for the hundreds of thousands of people starving under intense bombardment. Visit gazafunds.org to contribute to relief funds, every donation helps the people of Palestine resist genocide, every donation is a potential life saved.

Visit chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza to help provide e-sims to keep Palestinians in Gaza in contact with their families and the outside world.

Visit bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott for information on which companies are investing in, or directly involved in the occupation. 

Spread this message everywhere you can. This Holocaust is being systematically covered up through mainstream media silence and social media censorship. Visit clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2025-05-23-emergency-bulletin-zionists-begin-last-stage-of-genocide for the web version of this article, or unity-struggle-unity.org/palestine-emergency-bulletin-tri-fold for a printable PDF copy. Get this message into as many hands as possible! With every hour that passes more innocent men, women, children, and babies are being murdered. U.S. bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes, built with parts from Canada, the E.U., targeted by surveillance drones from the U.K. 

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY. 

INACTION IS COMPLICITY. 

THIS HOLOCAUST IS BEING CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENDING IT.

Iraq was bombed into desolation — its electricity grid, water systems, hospitals, roads, bridges, and even sewage systems were reduced to rubble. Their bloodlust still unquenched, the U.S. used depleted uranium rounds, poisoning the land and condemning generations to birth defects and cancer. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked whether she regretted the slaughter of over half a million Iraqi children, calmly declared on 60 Minutes that it was “worth it”  (Twaij, 2022). A personal memory, I recall once watching a lecture by Arundhati Roy who remarked on the U.S. justification of the bombing of Iraq, “We are expected to believe that the U.S. Marines were sent on a feminist mission.” One truly has to applaud the audacity of the lie. However, this kind of propaganda is hardly uncommon in the history of U.S. imperialism; it is very much par for the course that they hide behind the language of human rights and progressive Western feminism to justify their carte blanche bombing campaigns that eviscerate women, men, and children alike. The hypocrisy cannot be ignored — a woman in a position of senior leadership in the U.S. actively contributed to a campaign that resulted in the catastrophic rollback of women’s rights, safety, and security.

In Syria, America waged a relentless crusade to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, once again cloaking itself in the rhetoric of “democracy and human rights” — not unlike Iraq (and countless other cases throughout the 20th century). As a result, the nation that was once called the cradle of civilization is today a blood-soaked nightmare of unimaginable human tragedy, all because the U.S. demanded a regime change in favor of someone more amenable to their investor and business class interests (Naiman, 2015).

To add to the ensuing horror even further, America continues its crusade of calamity in Yemen, where its bombs continue to shred civilian infrastructure, while American money and weapons fuel Saudi aggression. Meanwhile, Israel, armed to the teeth with U.S. military aid, carries out daily atrocities with impunity, trampling human rights as the world watches in silence (Saleh, 2025). And I have only scratched the surface of American imperialism — and only over the last few decades, in just one part of the world — all while it claims to act under the moral mission of civilization and humanitarianism.

Is it reasonable, then, to expect nations broken and shattered by such wars and foreign intervention to function in any democratic manner? We do not — and cannot — know what these nations might look like today had they been allowed to develop on their own terms, guided by the specific and unique cultural, material, and economic practices democratically determined by their own citizens. The argument is often made that West Asian nations remain undeveloped because Islam is a backward religion that breeds terrorism and oppression — as if religious belief alone determines the course of a nation’s progress. But progress is not born of ideology; it comes from the democratic participation of the masses and the historical and material conditions in which they live and struggle. The idea that faith in a particular god sets the limits of development is not only wrong — it is ahistorical and frankly, absurd. The Western Liberal Democracies, dripping with a colonial arrogance so vast and insatiable it eclipses all of history, lecture such nations on “Progressive Politics.” Yet was it not these same nations that razed to the ground even the tiniest sliver of hope and institutional framework required to achieve such a thing?

Furthermore, if the Western model of development is so superior — if the ideals of the Enlightenment were truly as revolutionary as they are claimed to be – then why did it take centuries for women, Black people, people of color, Indigenous peoples, minorities, Queer communities, and immigrants to even begin to be treated with dignity and granted equal rights? And that struggle, I should add, is still far from over. As a glaring example, just four years of Donald Trump was enough to destabilize the American “Democratic” system so thoroughly that the federal right to abortion — Roe v. Wade — was overturned. Just four years of one reactionary leader. Now imagine decades of that, layered with war, foreign occupation, sabotage, and poverty, with not a single institution left standing to hold back the worst instincts of violence and repression. That is — and has been — the reality for much of West Asia, and far beyond.

Not only has Western liberalism failed to deliver on these rights and promises throughout its historical development, but it continues to fail — with equal, if not greater, force — even today. On this, I offer both historical and contemporary evidence. Consider first what the famed liberal hero Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about the workers’ revolt of the June Days Uprising in 1848: “After the outbreak of the workers’ revolt, de Tocqueville was not only in favor of conferring emergency powers on Cavaignac but recommended shooting on sight anyone caught ‘in a posture of defense’” (Losurdo, 2011, ch. 10).

Now consider Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed champion of the working class, who calls himself the “most pro-union president” and has been hailed by historians as the greatest advocate for workers since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Loomis, 2024). Yet this same president blocked a bill that would have granted sick leave to railroad workers, denying the demands of more than 115,000 workers who had gone on strike in 2022. And this was not some anomaly or failing of character — it is the function of liberalism itself, which gives with one hand and takes with the other, only retreating when popular movements threaten its order. Even on the rare occasions when liberals do offer concessions, they are steadily eroded into nothing by one reformist negation after another. As Losurdo (2011) writes, “At issue was canceling, or more or less drastically reducing, the democratic concessions won from liberal society by the popular movement.” And as de Tocqueville made clear, when that fails, the gun will do. As the old saying goes: scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.

If we are indeed asked to believe that liberalism is an ideology adorned with glitter and gold, then we must confront an unavoidable question: how can such ideas give rise to some of the most depraved acts of horror ever known to humanity? The contradiction between liberalism’s glittering promises and its reality is precisely the primordial force that necessitates its overwhelming need to oppress.

To further emphasize: as we have already demonstrated, these liberal ideas were never inherently superior; they were not even exclusively European. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment — pillars of so-called “Western thought” — emerged only through a deep engagement with earlier Greek and Roman texts, which in turn drew heavily on the scholarly achievements of Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Mesopotamians (modern-day Iraq) (Davidson, 2006). Yet today, many of these regions are dismissed by the West as “uncivilized” or “underdeveloped.” The irony would almost be laughable, were it not so tragically real. As Michael Parenti observed, “The third world is not underdeveloped, they are overexploited.”

Moreover, even in their European form, these ideas were never truly progressive; they were always fundamentally Hobbesian and Machiavellian in their outlook on human nature. It was only the emergence of genuinely revolutionary ideas that forced liberals to concede to democratic ideals. The liberal framework, as we have discussed, can only muster reforms that preserve the existing state machinery, whereas revolutionary thought dares to transcend it. Consider the institution of slavery: a liberal might express shock at the slave’s plight and propose marginal improvements — better clothing or food — while the revolutionary would cry out, “Come, comrade, let us shatter the chains of slavery!” That is precisely the kind of transformative progress that followed the Bolshevik Revolution when peasants gained literacy and women secured equal pay, voting rights, and the opportunity to hold office (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 1983). Throughout history, liberals have consistently resisted the sweeping democratic changes championed by revolutionary movements.

Is it any wonder, then, that nations devastated by Western colonial and imperial ambitions remain broken beyond comprehension? Those of us in the West who are not members of racially or economically privileged groups did not receive our rights out of benevolence; rather, we were forced, for the first time in history, to compete with a rival political system that was materially superior and genuinely progressive. It was this competitive drive — fueled by the extraordinary social and human progress of the Soviet Union, combined with decades of development untainted by colonial or imperial interference — that enabled Western societies to evolve into what they are today.

If these same conditions were systematically denied to nations in the Global South through neocolonial exploitation, debt entrapment, illegal coups, and invasions, then it is not only unfair but intellectually dishonest to blame them solely for their own lack of progress.

If we were to allow these nations to develop according to their own histories — if we were to let their people prosper on their own terms, and if the forces of production, labor, and industry were free to drive genuine democratic participation — then, just as in every other society, the rights of minorities, women, and other oppressed groups would naturally flourish over time. Not out of moral charity, but because the conditions of their growth would make progress inevitable. We are told to measure progress by the standards of those who denied it to others. But given the chance — given peace, sovereignty, and the right to chart their own course — these nations would not need lectures from the West. They would show us what real progress looks like.

Citations:

1. Al-Shammari, M. (2023), “Women’s Education: Cultural and Religious Solutions from the Heart of Afghanistan”, Middle East Council on Global Affairs, https://mecouncil.org/publication/womens-education-cultural-and-religious-solutions-from-the-heart-of-afghanistan/
2. Twaij, A (2022), “Let’s remember Madeleine Albright for who she really was”, Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-madeleine-albright-as-who-she-really-was
3. Naiman, R (2015), “WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath”, Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/wikileaks-reveals-how-the-us-aggressively-pursued-regime-change-in-syria-igniting-a-bloodbath/
4. Davidson, N (2006), “Islam and the Enlightenment”, Socialist Worker, https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/islam-and-enlightenment/
5. Saleh, A. (2025), “Yemen dismantles UK-Saudi espionage network and continues to attack strategic US and Israeli targets”, Peoples Dispatch, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/08/yemen-dismantles-uk-saudi-espionage-network-and-continues-to-attack-strategic-us-and-israeli-targets/
6. Loomis, E. (2024), “Biden’s labor report card: Historian gives ‘Union Joe’ a higher grade than any president since FDR” Government Executive, https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/05/bidens-labor-report-card-historian-gives-union-joe-higher-grade-any-president-fdr/397002/
7. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1983), United Nations, https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw25years/content/english/CONCLUDING_COMMENTS/Russian_Federation/Union_of_Soviet_Socialist_Republic-CO-1.pdf

Mahmoud has not been charged with any listed offense; his crime is his support for the Palestinian national liberation movement. Mahmoud stood against the slaughter of his people and the ongoing theft of their homeland. The fascist Empire is committed to worldwide terror and the enslavement of humanity. The state would rather us remain silent, going about our cleaved lives apathetic to genocide — this is vile and unacceptable. 

Free speech is dead. Did it ever exist in the first place?

Our free speech rights go about as deep as a puddle on the side of the road. The American Fourth Reich, aided by the skeletal Democratic party, has gutted what little was left of so-called “civil liberties” in this country. The U.S.’s liberal democracy was founded on the “rights” of only the white, slave-owning, and propertied classes, leaving everyone else, especially enslaved peoples, grasping for the shards of a deadened life.

Regardless of what the slave owners who founded this country may have intended when they wrote the Constitution in 1791, the settler-imperial government has never meaningfully valued free speech. Just seven years and one president later, the John Adams administration would pass the Alien and Sedition Acts: the Sedition laws criminalized any negative speech against the government, while the Alien Acts let the president deport any foreign nationals. Adams, who was a federalist, used the Sedition Acts to arrest journalists supporting his political opponents, the Democratic Republicans. The minute differences between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans are not terribly significant — (both supported the slavery of New Afrikans and the genocide of Indigenous Turtle Islanders) — suffice to say they were the two dominant tendencies of early USian politics. Adams lost the political battle; the Democratic Republicans won the next election and repealed the Sedition Acts. And the Alien Acts? They remain in effect to this day. The president may therefore deport any foreign national they consider to be dangerous, based on this 225 year old law.  In essence, dystopian state repression is one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy.

The Alien and Sedition Acts would be the first major crackdown on free speech, but they are not the last, nor the most recent. The Democratic-Republicans had their own opportunity to silence mass dissent a few decades later when the abolition of slavery became a contentious issue. In 1836, an Andrew Jackson-controlled Congress ratified a gag order banning any mention of abolition in the halls of Congress. 

In light of the modern national security state, first amendment rights are shallow.  With state surveillance and a history of interference in liberation movements, an American citizen’s speech may be free, but only so long as their words remain barren and removed from action. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement: when nationally oppressed groups peaceably assemble, we can see time and time again that the First Amendment often has a selective application. Perpetual surveillance, state assassinations; sharpened knives which they are ready to use against any defiant organization. 

Before the regime will criminalize your collective expression, two circumstances must generally be met. 

1. The expression must be dissent, i.e., it must go against the regime’s foreign or domestic policy.
2. The expression must be popular. The degree of popularity can vary, but generally, the dissenting speech or collective expression must be popular enough for the regime to consider it a threat to its rule or the implementation of its policy. 

Popular dissent is forbidden.  

If this clownish blockheaded President is trying to weaken free speech rights on campus, he is late to the party. Colleges and universities across the Empire beat him to the punch by launching a full scale offensive against the right to protest before the Fall 2024 semester. Protests now have formal time limits. They are banned in popular gathering spots. Fascism on the Amerikkkan campus is objectively bipartisan. Trump’s threat is a promise to build upon the groundwork that was laid last year. Do not be scared. For fear is your greatest enemy. Now, we’re all able to see clearly without the blinding, twisted distortions of Democrats who use identity essentialism as bait in order to duplicitously rally support for their graveyard of a party, and therefore gut the very undercarriage of revolutionary understanding and action of the mass of vexed workers.

Saturday’s attack on student resistance was orchestrated by the regime’s use of the word “terrorist;” it is, by all means, a propagandistic term in the modern U.S., the same way “communist” was in the past, and is in the present. The state of course uses the veneer of a mythical “antisemitism” to justify its draconian measures. Claims of a phantasmal antisemitism from the very same administration that goes around giving Nazi salutes. Remember, the Trumpian gendarmes are the very same ilk that said “Jews will not replace us.” The very same people whose base committed a massacre in a synagogue,  now want to wage a “holy war,” which they pretend is for the very Jewish people they tried to mass murder. 

However, we must recognize that we’re in the depths of a revolutionary moment. The inflection points of class war are nearing a breaking crescendo, and it is up to us in the anti-imperialist movement to understand this dialectic of intense struggle and form a clear and firm guide to action. Now is the time to unite with left and progressive forces (While not compromising the proven Marxists analysis) to defeat the fascist juggernaut. In the age of techno-imperialism and the mass slaughter of our people, we must do away with the muddled Trotskyist tendency of splintering into groups of 50 (that has historically gutted the left in this country) and form a temporary alliance to defeat the strangling repression of the Trump regime. We, the mass reserved army of labor must pick up the red banner and fight for the liberation of all those colonized, imprisoned, and hyper-exploited. 

Over the coming weeks and years the three stages of the ceasefire agreement are supposed to be completed (that is, if the zionists do not reverse the process). The conditions are: the beginning of a ceasefire, the releasing of settler hostages, the freeing of Palestinian political prisoners, the clearing of IOF forces out of Gaza, and humanitarian relief. Stage two formally establishes the ceasefire and consists of more freeing of Palestinian political prisoners. Stage three is the great reconstruction of Gaza.

In the past, Democrats pointed fingers at the Bush family for their genocides in Iraq. Now, Palestine, Gaza, this is their genocide. The Democratic Party genocide. The Biden-Harris genocide. They said the other party would do genocide worse — but now it is wholly the operation of the Democratic Party. Still, arguing Trump is worse when it comes to Gaza can be ascribed only to ignorance and lies. Every Democrat who said there was no way to stop the genocide has nothing to say now. Nothing remains in the bank of excuses — it is empty, they have no choice but to embrace reaction even more explicitly and to deny the blatant reality that has arrested their efforts.

Reactionaries will try to sell the lie that this ceasefire changes the entire situation. Fundamentally, no change in the relation between colonizer and colonized has been affected. Palestine remains in antagonism with the zionist entity; struggle for the liberation of Palestine continues as long as the zionist entity continues to exist. It is a temporary move, not a permanent qualitative leap.

It is important to stress this because as we write these words, the zionist imperialist running dogs are now proceeding to storm the streets of Jenin in the West Bank (after already having stormed Jenin time and time again in the years of constant attack and bombardment). Zionists are ordering displacement of Palestinian people in Jenin and are trying to kill the Palestinian resistance there, which is itself, like Gaza, a home of refugees displaced from other Palestinian communities. To the degree that Gaza is able to live in so-called “peace” shall be the degree to which Jenin is being bombed and raided.

Gaza — every city; north, south and central — is left completely in ruins. Not a single part has been untouched, there are but rubble and broken families scattered about, the people dreaming of relatives that today only exist as memories. Already before October, Gaza suffered high rates of PTSD, depression, and poor mental health — particularly among youth. How much has it risen, after 400 days? Now more than ever before, the terrorized Palestinian people will fight for their nation; the Palestinian people have repeatedly had to bury entire family lines and have been militarized by it. If it was to be argued that this was about clearing Gaza of resistance fighters, even the highest-ranking zionist officials know (though perhaps want to forget) that this is impossible — unless every Palestinian person is murdered. The women and youth are now militarized. Gaza’s streets were filled with civilians chanting “we’d rather die than be humiliated.” And this is why zionism can only mean the complete extermination of the Palestinian people. A permanent ceasefire is impossible — it will not hold, it is simply extra time for the zionist entity; a ceasefire is an unsolved antagonism, it will last as long as the previous ceasefire that was agreed to in 2021. There have been many ceasefire agreements — practically every zionist operation in Gaza has ended with a ceasefire, though the firing never ceases — and soon after the zionist offensive against Palestine started back up in full swing.

We have to stay vigilant. Palestine must remain our pulsing priority, all the more so because we are in the imperial core — the decaying, moribund, spiritually dead core that has been trying and failing miserably to wash its hands of all of the Palestinian blood that has stained it. 

What, in any case, is a ceasefire when the West Bank is still under attack? What is ceasefire while relentless, unyielding settler expansion continues into Gaza, along with the continued colonialist whitewashing and demolition of everything Palestinian? What is a ceasefire when Palestine is still under blockade, when Palestine still cannot control its resources and the zionists can cut them off at any time, when Palestinians do not even have houses to live in during wintertime?

Criticism must be made of those who insisted only upon “ceasefire now” in the west: a westerner is someone drowned in material privileges from the super exploitation of the entire world. On this basis, chauvinism is a conditioned trait of the westerner. To be cured of it they must be persistently, unceasingly educated in a decolonial Marxist politic that leads them to supporting resistance of the third world against “their own” bourgeoisie, imperialism, and colonialism. “Ceasefire now” accomplishes nothing in this direction — it only requires temporary attention to a colony, rather than the persistent demand for the immediate liberation of the colony. We will not stop and shall not rest until the dissolution of zionism. “Ceasefire now” only means taking the knife out of the back of the oppressed by a few inches. It neither removes the knife nor covers the wound. It does not start any process of healing and restoration. This demand being so strongly emphasized will bring with it many “pro-Palestine” westerners who only care for Palestine when the terror is most explicit — and they will be distracted and apathetic. These people will forget about Palestine and will turn away to join the rest of the world in its collective amnesia and complicity. 

We have a ceasefire, but it is a ceasefire within the bounds of genocide. On the part of zionists and the imperialists which direct them, the point is still to make Palestine nonexistent, and to make the Palestinian people a bygone fact. Netanyahu tried to delay the ceasefire agreement — one of the many signs that the zionist entity is simply, by virtue of existence, incompatible with peace. And on the morning of January 29th, a zionist air strike murdered ten Palestinians in the West Bank, purportedly “militants.” Every Palestinian is a militant to the zionist entity because the Palestinians have dared to not be eradicated. 

It is being argued this ceasefire is an agreement the Trump administration helped push — this interpretation is incorrect. A certain use for this claim might be found as a jab at the genocidal Biden administration and the genocidal Democratic Party to show how, for all their supposed “progressivism” and “concern for human rights,” they did not stop the genocide or even bring about the ceasefire. Instead, they did the opposite. But this forgets what is crucial; the ceasefire agreed to was the same one the Palestinian resistance itself several months ago proposed, which the zionists initially rejected. When it comes to the ceasefire, one point must be borne in mind: the Palestinian resistance has forced it through political-military power. They have forced it through mortars and explosives, through liquidating tanks and by shooting back at zionist invaders. It was not the doing of any one person, but rather of the Palestinian resistance going on the offensive. The zionist entity spent 400 days fighting against the Palestinians for daring to refuse quiet submission to holocaust. The spirit of the Warsaw ghetto uprising existed within them, and all the passion went into fighting zionism. All the genocide, all the killing, and yet the Palestinian resistance has only become stronger. By the end of it, the zionist entity was simply losing, and they couldn’t possibly make it appear otherwise except to their most rabid supporters.

The zionists cannot win what they have already lost. They bombed all of Gaza, terrorized all its people but Hamas and Al-Qassam are still standing in Gaza today. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Al-Quds brigades are still standing. The PFLP and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades are still standing. And more brigades are emerging in the embrace of mass spontaneous demonstrations.

Marxists will always support armed resistance by Gaza and Palestine. “Well-meaning” young Marxists like to argue that zionists are first to attack in nine cases out of ten, and that in the case of October, the al-Aqsa flood, they had no choice; that the root cause stems back far before October. Perhaps in the context of talking to very confused people, this is sensible (hasbara monopolizes upon the insistence that there was no sign of this uprising coming and that it was some wanton act of violence), and most certainly this has to do with social context before October — but ideologically speaking, this is fundamentally not the point, because regardless of when the oppression began, Marxists support uprisings of the Palestinian resistance, supports national liberation wars, and supports them with utmost enthusiasm regardless of who attacks first, regardless of if it seems “unexpected” or not, regardless of whether or not it seems to have been timed correctly or strategically, regardless of all the ploys of the oppressor to placate the population and surrounding countries with deceptive promises and false peace treaties. With Palestine, the concern is not whether one side or the other attacked first. The concern is national liberation and the blow against imperialism and settler colonialism — an attack on capitalism itself. The violence of the oppressed is supported because it is scientific and a cleansing force against colonialism and imperialism.

All eyes must remain on Gaza because the zionists will violate the ceasefire again; it is not a matter of if but of when. It will come in the form of savage zionist terror that manages to surprise the entire world again and become even worse than before. 

All eyes must remain on Palestine, but also on Lebanon and Yemen, both of which the zionist entity will repeatedly aggress against regardless of this ceasefire agreement. 

And all eyes must remain on all the agents of terror who in one way or another perpetuated this genocide. They must not be allowed to sleep in peace. We shall swamp them with the irate and strenuously haunt them with the deceased. And when the ceasefire inevitably fails, it is they who will be at fault for all of the renewed suffering and the renewed terror.

When “Israelis” left Europe to settle Palestine in 1948, they brought European plants with them to remind them of “home” — the home they said did not accept them. Introducing non-native plant species was also a means to drive Palestinians out of their own homeland and towns and deny them access to water and land.

One tree the settlers favored was the eucalyptus tree, known in “Israel” as the “Jewish Tree” (despite being native to Australia) as it was so instrumental to the colonization of Palestine.

But first, what is settler-colonialism? Colonialism is the forceful arrival of settlers into a land that is already occupied to enable exploitation benefiting these settlers’ state back home. The settler part, however, presupposes that a native population, which becomes Indigenous when it exists in relation to settlers, is being displaced permanently so that settlers can occupy their homeland for themselves. Settler-colonialism creates new countries where none existed, and usually ends up carving out a state of their own instead of staying beholden to the state that sent them in the colonies — an example being pre-independence British Colonies and post-independence United States of America.

The importation of these foreign plant species into Palestine firstly played a part in concealing the Nakba. After 1948, zionist organizations planted more than 250 million trees in Palestine, most of which were invasive pines and eucalyptus. These trees were planted around the ruins of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and emptied during the Nakba. Under the guise of “turning the desert green”, land around ancestral Palestinian communities was seeded with these foreign plant species and then expropriated to be turned into a ‘natural reserve’ that is neither natural nor a reserve of anything. Legally, it means the land cannot be built on. It cannot be excavated. The Nakba is concealed.

When objections are raised about this practice, settlers —  who think of everything in terms of their potential for exploitation — is “well, at least we’re doing something with the land!” but Palestinians were doing something with the land too. Just because the settlers didn’t understand this relationship doesn’t mean that the land was not being used in some way.

It’s difficult in the West to understand ties to the land. We are removed from the processes of production, and see commodities only as the object in front of us on the grocery store shelf. We don’t see the labor that went into bringing us vegetables on a stall or candy in the aisles. Someone has to till the land, someone has to plant the seeds, someone has to water the sprouts, and someone has to harvest, package, and drive the grown crops to the store so we can eat them.

Thus, we think of land in the abstract. We think that the shelves will always bear food, because from our perspective it just appears there, conjured out of thin air. But for most of human history (and for a vast portion of the world still today) this has not been the case. It was instantly clear to any farmer of the past, including in Europe, that land had to be taken care of lest it stopped providing for good.

Before the Nakba, Palestinians distributed land communally under the Masha’a system. Plots were distributed among families for a certain period, and land outside villages was held in common for grazing and collecting firewood.

Many ways in which Palestinians made use of the desert and marshes and why they chose to leave them as they did may have very well been lost in the Nakba. Most of the information about the Masha’a practice in Western studies comes from British sources and is thus seen through their worldview. After which, the absence of evidence about how people used to survive on their native land is used by the settler to justify more of their destructive practices.

A system that works for its population cannot be said to be a failed system. That settlers “made the desert green” is a childish myth for a childish people who mythologize their history where none has been. Throughout history, Palestine had long been a provider of commodities around the Mediterranean. Even today, the only use “Israelis” have for the Naqab desert is to abandon asylum seekers there to die. No settler wants to live in the desert — they prefer the lush, neatly-colonized landscapes west of the Jordan, or the seaside accommodations that Gaza keeps away from them. What one finds in the Naqab today are 36 unrecognized Palestinian villages that do not appear on any map (including Google Maps), and several kibbutz suspiciously close to the border with Jordan; this makes sense within “Israeli” settler-colonial policy, as the kibbutz were established to serve as the first line of human shields against incursions (and that is indeed the purpose they served on October 7, 2023).

The introduction of destructive species in Palestine has disrupted local ecosystems and the availability of water. Eucalyptus trees drink up as much water as is made available to them, which can be used to justify not providing water to Palestinian communities – and eventually forces Palestinians to abandon their homes. Eucalyptus trees have also been the cause of many wildfires in Palestine — the oil in the bark is highly flammable and makes the trees explode under heat, spreading the fire. Wildfires in Palestine are now more common than they used to be, and this can be directly attributed to the presence of foreign plants that have been imported to Palestine.

Since 1967, settlers in Palestine have uprooted over 800,000 olive trees — trees which are suited to the local climate and provide food and livelihood to millions of Palestinians. Settlers are not interested in cultivating olives for themselves; they prefer to destroy these generational trees and import olive oil from Turkey or Spain; Because of this, the “Israeli” settler state has become the 35th largest importer of olive oil in the world. The settler state turns itself into a caricature because no concessions can be given — not one step back can be made.

The ramifications of this form of colonialism are plenty. Under humanitarian concerns, the settler reinforces their power and ensures the native population will never be a problem for them. They kill the Indigenous; they force them into reservations; they sever their ties to the land that feeds us all, and then wonder why climate catastrophes happen. And when these catastrophes happen, the settler retort is to say “well, there’s just nothing we could have done to prevent this!” To say otherwise would mean recognizing that the land is occupied and that people did know what to do for hundreds of years, but they were uprooted and severed from the land — only then will the settler know peace, however briefly. To recognize and integrate Indigenous practices would mean to recognize their claim to ownership of the land – at least partly – and this is antithetical to the survival of any settler state.

Despite being removed from its process of production, land is land: it feeds us. We extract its resources for our devices. This is true whether one is Palestinian, European, American, or anyone else.

In 1626, when Puritans arrived in what is now Salem, located off the Bay of Massachusetts, they came across empty buildings and, thinking they were abandoned, appropriated them. By winter, when the Naumkeag band of the Massachusett came back to their winter fishing grounds for the season, they found white people occupying their homes, redecorating them to suit their European tastes. Instead of driving them out, the Naumkeag welcomed these newcomers as people needing help in a new land they did not know. They taught the English how to cultivate the land, how to plant in the hills productively, and how to survive there.

In Salem the settlers drained swamps and built upon them houses and industry, despite the fact that the Naumkeag had been living perfectly well with these swamps next to their fishing grounds for thousands of years. They understood the importance of these biomes because they had lived with them for millennia. In Salem too the rocky hills in Salem were also a problem to the settlers — just another obstacle to be flattened, destroyed and paved over.

When Europeans came to Turtle Island, they thought they were seeing wilderness; huge forests and marshes greeted them. But what they were actually seeing were carefully-tended autonomous systems that served as breadbaskets for the Indigenous population. Controlled burns were used seasonally to renew the soil, promote the growth of fire-adapted plants and prevent wild forest fires. Over generations, these burns could be massive and span over hundreds of miles — but they were not random. They were the result of careful planning over decades.

As fires destroy entire towns in California right now, we may want to remember that Native American burns across Arizona and New Mexico showed that it is possible to break the typical climate-fire pattern across large areas. This pattern consists of a few years of rainfall promoting plant growth followed by a year of drought that starts wildfires. It becomes even more mind-boggling to witness these fires and wonder how much must have gone wrong that things have come to this when Indigenous people would be able to enact these practices today in California, but are kept away from doing so at the administrative level.

Native tribes actively managed and enriched forests by introducing beneficial species and useful plants for human life that could thrive in a given system. Plants were sustainably harvested and encouraged to become resilient by sometimes purposely — but always strategically — disturbing the ecosystem.

This was not wilderness and neither was it unique to the Americas. This was not undeveloped land. It looked undeveloped to the European eye because they did not see cobble roads or brick houses, but it sustained life for millions of people for millennia. The European considered the Natives’ tie to the land magical, as if they had some secret sixth sense and knew just where to find berries and game, because they could not see the approach taken to building a multi-generational system with reason and labor.

Dams along the Klamath river were removed just three months ago to restore salmon populations, and now enlightened descendants of Europeans are blaming the Indigenous populations that led this initiative for dispersing water that could have been used against the fires. But salmon indirectly help forests become resilient against wildfires, and this is what the settler mind refuses to see.

The Naumkeag band used the Salem grounds as their seasonal fishing spot. How did all the fish happen to congregate there specifically?

And European settlers could have enjoyed this way of life too — the Naumkeag and many other tribes did not pick up weapons against them, even as the settlers killed them off with diseases they brought over from Europe, but instead welcomed them into their homes and communities, teaching them what they knew of the land. Instead, settlers chose to create reservations outside of the nations’ ancestral homelands through 535 treaties that the U. S. government broke with the Indigenous at every turn.

In California, forest fires are a natural risk. The climate is naturally prone to wildfires, and certainly climate change is worsening the situation. But the European response to these constant risks is always to consume more. Build more dams to dump more water on more fires. Then build more walls to retain more water when the dams flood. Build more dykes to help the walls we built…

Indigenous practices are not magical or mystical. They are the result of understanding the local conditions (something we all do as humans) through practice over millennia. What seems more magical is expecting that we would be able to transpose foreign practices to entirely different conditions with no friction.

I can tell you one thing: if the land in California had been under Native stewardship, the fires would not be destroying thousands of acres, countless homes, and causing the suffering we are all witnessing at this moment.

Hanan, who grew up in a refugee camp near Bethlehem, won the award for her work supporting children traumatized by violence, a violence she knew all too well when her 9-year-old twins and 6-year-old son were shot at by IDF soldiers during the second Intifada. Only around 10 years earlier had her husband, a chemist, been released by Israeli authorities after a decade-long incarceration.

Violence targeting and affecting the educational infrastructure of the Palestinian State, specifically inside of the Gaza Strip concentration camp, is no outlier when it comes to the strategy of the zionist military. On the 10th of October, 2023, the IOF bombed the first university established in the strip, the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), destroying multiple buildings and disrupting the lives of thousands of students and faculty. Around the same time, Palestine Technical College announced two of their students had been killed in airstrikes, while a PhD student and his family on vacation in the strip were also victims of zionist air-to-surface missiles. What Palestinian students and teachers have been subjected to what can only be described as scholasticide, with most having not attended school for over a year under the relentless destruction caused by the invading forces of the zionist entity.

A Brief History of Higher Education in the Gaza Strip

Before 1967, no universities existed in either the occupied West Bank nor the Gaza Strip. Palestinian students, however, enjoyed free access to numerous Arab universities across the Middle East. Due to the fact that people in the West Bank were considered Jordanian citizens, most had direct access to the University of Jordan. Likewise, those in the strip could go to Egypt to complete their degrees.

This access was curbed when the zionists, after their crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War,  enforced their occupation, stiffening border security and harassing those leaving and reentering alike, making a trip abroad almost completely impossible. It was around this time that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) started to heavily consider independent higher education inside Palestine itself. By 1978, a few existing junior colleges had been expanded and two universities, the An-Najah National University in the West Bank and the aforementioned IUG, had been founded. 

The zionists, of course, could not handle what it saw as an attempt to subvert their authority, and began to burden the schools with numerous obstacles. Licensing was time consuming and strictly enforced on an annual basis, building permits were stalled and fought tooth-and-nail all the way to the Supreme Court, and military authorities illegally withheld tax exemptions on construction, materials, and books. Censorship of books and other written material on school campuses was regular under the pretence of “security reasons,” as was withholding work permits for international faculty and Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship. Yet more, this battle of red tape paled in comparison to the military-enforced shutdowns that schools were regularly subjected to, a sinister prelude to the scholasticide we see happening today. 

The State of Education in Gaza Today

Since the zionist onslaught on the Gaza Strip renewed in October, 2023, access to education has been reduced to nearly zero. What remains of structured education has been limited to rudimentary study groups within tents turned makeshift classrooms. Even this, as bare bones as it sounds, is regularly uprooted by constant “evacuation orders” and random airstrikes. The destruction of more than 378 schools and universities across the strip led to these conditions, and the pariah state of “israel” sees no reason to stop their crimes against humanity.

It is estimated that, at the very least, 11,500 students below the age of 18 have been murdered, along with 750 of their teachers as of September. Because of the lack of resources, finding a true body count is impossible at this stage, leaving the Ministry of Health and international organizations alike in the dark about any sort of real estimate. This inability to properly count casualties, of course, plays into the narrative that ANY number given is false and created by “Hamas” to discredit “israel”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and also suggests that any official count is a vast underestimate. We can easily transfer this logic of an undercount to the official number of teachers and students who have been made victims in the year-long massacre, showing the extent of pure devastation that has been wrought on the education system of Gaza. There is a clear line between the targeted military shutdowns of the past to the genocide by air we see being committed today; it is clear that the zionist entity sees education, not only of the higher variety but of elementary and secondary as well, as a form of independence for Palestinian people that it just cannot let live, and a direct threat to the legitimacy of the ethno-state occupying Palestinian lands.

Scholasticide as an Imperial strategy

What we see in Gaza is an extension of imperial science; no cultural institution may get in the way of empire’s ambitions. If the institution, or even the subjects within the institution, start to fall out of line with said strategy, certain advantages once enjoyed by said institution can be readily taken away. An example of this is the spring and summer of 2024, when students across the United States and Canada rose up, occupying campuses and buildings alike in an attempt to force these imperial entities to stop supporting what the zionists’ genocide of Palestinians. What should have been accepted as a show of our great “first amendment rights” turned into a state crackdown, supported by both parties in the U.S. government and spurred on by President Joe Biden. What these crackdowns show is how easily the privileged status of colleges and universities can be revoked when the students and faculty take even one step out of the bounds set by the imperial masters, the status quo that reinforces the norm of violence unto those in the peripheries.

The zionists did not invent this strategy. The attacks being inflicted on vital Palestinian educational infrastructure is an age-old colonial tactic, one that must be combatted at all costs, with vehement opposition from those in the imperial core being used to amplify the voices of those within the periphery. Palestine must be free, and its education must be allowed to flourish to nourish a vibrant national identity. We in the metropole must do our part in aiding them in their valiant attempt to throw off their oppressors.

Education and National Identity

The removal of education – already established as a fundamental strategy of the IOF in Gaza – can be seen as an extension of the goal the entity has had since even before the Nakba of 1948: the total elimination of a Palestinian nationality. Strong national ties to a state’s higher institutions have helped cultivate the culture and language of any one given region, giving certain peoples a “permission to narrate” their own story as said by Edward Said. Imagine England without Oxford, Germany sans Heidelberg, and the United States itself without its precious prodigious Ivy League schools. To have these is to have a certain authority, one which, despite the myriad mistakes and problems within them as they exist at present, lends a certain credence to the people associated. Criticisms aside, academia has the unique ability to assist the progression of a group, especially when academics stay within their locales. Cuba, despite crushing sanctions on the tiny island, has produced, beyond its limits, world-class doctors. These doctors have, to the chagrin of many Western nations (specifically the U.S.) elevated the status of the country. If a region does not suffer a brain drain, these college educated people can lead to a drastically more self-sufficient society.

The zionists know this, and they may have discovered it after they created their own so-called “problem.” As noted before, Palestinians were only able to leave to get any higher education. The West Bank alone was Jordanian territory. Israel itself created the conditions that led to the establishment of universities after their 1967 victory, isolating Palestinians to the Gaza Strip and the aforementioned West Bank, which no longer fell under Jordanian jurisdiction. Only after this isolation from other Arab states forced upon them by the occupation did the PLO even consider the need for higher learning within Palestinian territory. A reliance on Arab nationalism may have stifled any ideas for this before, but now there was a necessity. 

The establishment of universities in 1978 coincided with the slow movement of the Palestinians away from strict Arab nationalism and into a homegrown identity of those still within the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. By the late 80’s and the First Intifada, most of the leadership of the PLO had not stepped foot into Palestine proper in decades. The rise and subsequent popularity of Hamas thereafter shows a clear split from those abroad and those within the territories actively under occupation by Israel.

Doctors and researchers were not absent; in fact the lack of mobility actually led to the majority of educated people in Palestine to stay there, to foster their skills and use them to full effect. This has led to highly skilled, highly motivated, and, to the zionists’ dissatisfaction, a highly homogenous populace. Those in Gaza and the West Bank aren’t, for a lack of a better word, stupid, nor are they confused, unfocused, helpless refugees. Palestinians have, despite everything stacked against them, fostered a deep academic tradition that has ushered them out of the PLO years where they relied heavily on their Arab siblings. When that reliance failed, they, undeterred, set out to carve their own path. Resolutely and unabashedly, the people within Palestine did what zionism could not bear; they chose to take back their permission to narrate, their ability to tell their own story with their own words, and become self-reliant within and despite the structures of occupation that hang over their heads decade after decade. 

Zionism cannot let such things persist, because if they do, if a single school still stands, that means, with their settler-colonial mindset, Palestine as a people, as a nation, still has hope. For zionism to survive, this hope must be snuffed out at all costs. Zionism must block the light that is a Palestinian tomorrow.

The seats of power in the imperial core — Biden, Scholz, Macron, Starmer, etc. — who have the power to end this genocide with a phone call decide instead to brazenly defy the wishes of their own people, who have been protesting for Palestine nonstop for over a year.In such a context, it’s easy to feel dismayed. It’s easy to feel like nothing we do matters, like we have no power to change it.

But this is exactly what our imperial masters want us to think. They want us to stop supporting Palestine, to stop calling for an end to their meddling. The less they are challenged, the more they can continue the genocide on unimpeded. They want us to be complacent and quiet, but doing the opposite of what our enemy wants is already a step towards victory!

Be careful of actors who urge us to stay quiet and still, who try to redirect the riled up masses towards ineffective means of protest — or even stop them in their tracks.

What would have happened if Vietnam had said, “We can’t take on the might of the U.S. army, let’s surrender”? Or if Cuba had said, “The Batista regime is propped up by U.S. money, we’ll never win”?

What if Palestine had said, “This is hopeless, let’s accept our death”?

We can take inspiration from popular movements that succeeded, and study their tactics to apply them. But we have to do so on our terms, not on the terms our enemies decide are best for us.

In the West, we have long abandoned violence as a systematic means of political protest. It wasn’t so long ago that it used to be commonplace: just look at worker strikes in the late 19th century to see how they used to protest for things we now take for granted, such as universal health insurance or the eight hour workday. Over time, the bourgeoisie gave us token concessions to protect their power, and this had the (intended) effect of calming workers down. It’s harder to die for a cause when you have something to lose.

People like Gandhi are lionized over contemporaries like Bhagat Singh. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are heralded as champions of non-violence, despite both using violence (in different ways). And the John Browns, Malcolm Xs, and James Connollys of history are made out to be monsters.

The message is clear: to be a “good” citizen is to be peaceful, to make no waves, not to upset the social order. Non-violence has become a synonym for peace. Thus we have become accustomed to extending the olive branch to our violent political enemies in the name of peace, i.e. maintaining the status quo. But, as Kwame Ture said: “There’s a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace. So peace isn’t the answer, liberation is the answer. [To the question ‘you seem free at the moment’] I seem peaceful at the moment.”

Violence still exists around us — institutional violence, that is. Palestinian children are being bombed with our weapons. They’re being starved with our policies. Our governments demand peacefulness and compliance while they happily ignore popular demands and enact immense violence both abroad and at home. This is hypocrisy, and it’s built into the system.

The Palestinian Resistance has repeatedly expressed support for the massive movements of solidarity across the world, from marches to boycotts to student encampments. They want us to do more of this. We must listen to them, because they know best what will help Palestine, not “Israelis,” and certainly not Biden — the resistance knows best because they have been fighting the occupier for decades and have now made it into a global pariah, achieving all the goals the Operation Flood al-Aqsa sought to achieve; whereas zionists want to keep killing all Palestinians and would rather you not make a fuss or call attention to their genocide.

The International Court of Justice, a U.N. organ, agrees that “Israel” is committing a genocide and has ordered it to stop, to no avail. Now, their peacekeeping forces are being shot at — something which UNIFIL reports on the daily. “Israel’s” disobedience of U.N. orders is providing us with justification to keep the pressure on, and do each what we can to intensify that pressure.

I don’t know what the prognosis on Gaza looks like. I don’t think “Israel” knows either. This is reason enough to fight; nothing is settled until it’s over. We can only be sure about what’s happening right now, and the situation at this moment is this: there is no way “Israel” comes out of Gaza as anything other than a pariah state.

With every day that passes, zionists expose themselves just a little bit more as the deranged killers that they are. And through supporting them, our governments show themselves to be on the wrong side of the issue — and that this isn’t solely a problem with one or two individuals in government, or a problem of ignorance (that they don’t know what they’re supporting), but that this is calculated, institutional, and that it has gone on for decades even as different parties and individuals succeeded each other in office.

Zionists still expect to go about their lives unimpeded, when we’ve all watched babies mangled beyond recognition by missiles. After all they’ve done, they still expect to be able to fly their settler flags without consequences or promote zionism unchallenged in public.

They don’t grasp just how bad the situation will get for them yet. They will have no more friends. Much like “Israel” is ostracized from the world, so must we ostracize zionists from all circles. This means going against our instilled sense of peacefulness, which we have been brought up on to respect authority and politeness in all situations.

When you cheer for the killing of babies and families so you can own a beachfront property, you clearly position yourself as an enemy of all people, everywhere.

Zionism is not popular. In fact, zionism is so unpopular that our politicians have to make believe that their constituents are zionist, the media has to run sob stories about the poor IOF bulldozer drivers who ran over hundreds of Palestinians to get us to sympathize with them, social media has to ban us for posting anything against “Israel,” authorities have to crack down on protestors, and “private” interest groups have to spend millions doxxing students and buying out politicians to speak in favor of “Israel.”

If the protests were not effective, then they would not have required the repressive baton of the police to stop them. All of these acts of repression are meant to beat us into submission, to teach us learned helplessness. The major problem collective acts pose to the ruler is that they let us see we are far from alone, that there are millions of people on our side, and comparatively very few on theirs.

If zionism was so right, then the state of “Israel” wouldn’t need to be pouring millions into hasbara, making entire books filled with talking points that other zionists should use to defend their stolen homes and the massacres they cheer for.

They have the power of bombs on their side, but they don’t have the power of the masses. Those who have institutional power use different tactics than those who don’t. There’s already an imbalance of power, and so the balance of tactics must be equalized by other means than their bombs and their money.

We are expected to still carry polite conversation with zionists because our upbringing demands that we “respect our differences,” while they would never extend this politeness to us were we Palestinians — or even in the way of something they desire. They are polite with us because they think they can convert us to their death cult; the moment they realize we’re not buying, they will wish for our death all the same. Anyone who prevents settlers from stealing land might as well die, for they will not be useful to the grand plan.

All of this must change, and it will change. There is no world in which we can watch a 19-year-old burn alive in his hospital bed and still call to respect “both sides.” Anyone who does so has an agenda and is being duplicitous, and the first step for change is realizing when they’re doing this.

People on the fence must be corrected about their misconceptions and taught. Nobody is born with instilled science, we live and we learn. Many have spoken about how they “only” became firmly anti-zionist after October 7, when they saw the response from “Israel.” We must accept them — better late than never. But, we must see that they are genuine; again, don’t let the enemy tell you what to think. Many zionists like to pretend to be “concerned about civilians on both sides,” a position from which they will try to get you to abandon the fight and render you ineffectual. Anything short of the complete dismantlement of “Israel” is a concession to the enemy that they will use to drop more bombs and missiles and commit more open-grave massacres.

To do this, we must ourselves be exhaustively educated about zionism. Theory and practice go together, there can not be one without the other. Read and learn, and then apply that knowledge in the material world to effect material change: protest, strike, unionize, boycott! Refuse to order or ship items to “Israel” at your place of work, if you’re able. Take longer to deal with clients there. Misplace their orders, accidentally bump their items against a corner if you work in logistics. Get involved with local organizations that are doing direct action for Palestine!

Only you can decide how far you are able to get involved, but the first step is to recognize that together, we are stronger than they are. Start talking about Palestine with those around you, and find people in your proximity that feel the same way we all do after one year of open genocide. Talk to them, listen to each other: you’re not alone.

If we don’t want this genocide in Palestine to succeed, if we don’t want to send a message that genocide is tolerated and will happen with our silence from now on, if we don’t want genocide to the be new normal — then we must act!

The world is upside down. It is entering the height of its contradictions. They are culminating and soon a leap will happen: everything will change all at once in ways we cannot fully predict yet. But things are in motion already.

This is the law of dialectics, and it’s always faithfully happened.

I don’t want genocide to be the new normal, and if you don’t want that either, then ask yourself: what can I do right now to play my part?

Here is the ideological degradation of the yankee political movement. Here is our diagnosis. It has been desolated. It has been converted into a lackey of an imperialist colonialist government. It cannot even accept what is happening to itself.

We are now in the “post-politics” era of bourgeois propaganda. Now our politics is relegated to this ridiculous demand of democracy. If there are many genocides, a cop city for each municipal government in fascist amerikkka, another operation wetback, continued rabid islamophobia, continued rabid anti-immigrant and anti-refugee terror, continued genocide in Sudan, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Congo, continued constant executions of Black people which go to the protest of only a small awake portion of the masses of the yankee empire,  continued terroristic bombing of Syria, continued terroristic yankee occupation of Somalia — all this is fine. It is very well. We must protect our democracy. Our democracy first.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

Who wants to study politics, wants to work on politics, wants to practice politics? We cannot just sit and click a vote button or sign a letter and receive our portion of imperial privileges stolen from a poor country whose genocide we only protest tomorrow.

To Cesaire, colonialism is thingification — the bringing down of a person into dehumanized subhuman status. Now, we see furthermore the thingification of revolutionary consciousness. The social being of this nightmarish empire, of this settler project, has been split into dehumanized parts that are easily manipulable — the social consciousness hereof is bourgeois-ified to the extent that it is so degraded, so pacified, so depoliticized that it can now be, with a few words, with a few slogans, manipulated into turning off consciousness altogether, and into reaction.

The social consciousness derived from the majority’s social position in settler society has by default inclined them into such slavishness, into such political apathy, inaction, that they accept whatever the bourgeois fascist government says, and whatever its political parties and spiritual instruments of oppression say, by underwhelmingly deceptive slogans. That economic position — one that, not unlike the israelis, siphons material benefits from settler-colonial occupation and looting of the Global South — pollutes the worldview of those inside the U.S.-Canadian empire, hoping to ensnare us in a belief that the imperialist vampire is our friend. There is not even a need for a programme anymore in the yankee empire, only repetitions of: Democracy! Protect your rights! Lesser of two evils! Vote against Trump! It is just these simple, blank slogans – and by invoking them you have all of the workers paid off by the spoils of empire behind you, all of the social democrats and “vanguard communists” behind you, and it is now scandalous for anyone outside of this crowd to point this indisputably weak and illogical capitulation out to the world.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

Regarding the Black nation, this special colonial question, everyone who is still somehow awake still charges genocide. The chauvinists by contrast have disputed this, and demand only a paper “unity” between the white laborer and the Black laborer that completely ignores the super exploitation of the latter for the sake of the former.

Regarding immigrant people, so often fleeing the devastation of U.S. foreign policy, we charge genocide. The government is continuing its policies of concentration camps and systematic destruction of immigrant languages, culture, communities. Deportation is an instrument of the most chauvinistic and fascistic oppression. The chauvinists meantime are demanding merely a paper “immigrant non-immigrant unity.”

 To “protect democracy” means to close the border in the collective yankee mind. Chauvinism assuredly has always been embedded in the minds of the imperial “left,” as they are and always have been settlers here — and now it is flaring still more. Fascism was already here; the fascist positions before now were superficially rejected, now the fascist positions are widely, universally accepted, and our rotten, all pervasive chauvinism today is only deniable because, by its very omnipresence, it is now unquestionable. Deportation is rising; we vote for a cop. People die; we vote for the killers.

Unity only for unity’s sake: unity around “democracy” that does not exist.

 They speak of “democracy.” I speak of over a hundred thousand dead in Gaza, of wholesale slaughter of peoples, of Black peoples who are still being genocided, who are still suffering in the prison colonies, who are still being enslaved in the prison colonies. I am speaking of many genocides and immigrant people fleeing countries “our own” government has overthrown who are now being oppressed and deported again by this same government of ours. 

I am speaking of the fact that in the epoch of imperialism and colonialism, the national and colonial questions are embedded with all other problems. They speak of the need to “protect democracy.” I speak of the need to destroy a “democracy” which is itself the agent of colonialist and imperialist terrorism and wholesale slaughter of nationalities.
We need to destroy the “democracy” of Death Rows lined up state to state with Black people who are shipped to the objection of absolutely zero tangible social-political force to the legalized gallows. We need to destroy the “democracy” that smothers Syria, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon. We need to destroy the “democracy” that for more than 200 years has relegated Black people to  second-class citizenship. This “democracy” is rotten and parasitic. It demands we focus all our political energies on it until it consumes our capacity for political life. They are in anguish for this “democracy” of theirs. Insofar as it is a democracy of ongoing Nakba, of lynchings, of mass oppression of Black and Indigenous people, of occupations and coups, we aim to destroy it.

This demand for “democracy” is chauvinism. It is a demand for the improvement of a settler order that is committing many genocides, that is itself genocide against Turtle Island, and nothing more. This is the belly of the beast but it is not being accepted as such.

 As long as chauvinism continues to control our movement for the abolishing of present-day society, it is no such thing, and we have no urgency — we are not meeting the maturing crisis, and we are instead fleeing from it. We say we want to work “for democracy in November” because we want to regress into “business as usual” and accept the epoch of many genocides as normal. We have forsaken our Marxism and our anti-zionism for colonialist, ruling-class endorsed privileges. We are giving up on the oppressed for ourselves to be “ascended” still closer to being a bourgeoisie.

Without a single doubt there is a election coming upon the horizon which shall be the genocide ticket, in which the two parties of the bourgeoisie will indulge in theatrics and meaningless trifles, but fundamentally be enthusiastically propagandising and materially supporting the multiple genocides they are carrying out. Joe Biden, the so-called “most progressive” president of the empire is apathetic about the horrors he is supporting and we are left to debate “social gains” outside of a genocide we may or may not get as a result of this election cycle.
 He is actively, consistently supporting the genocidal entities which depend on his government. He is actively, consistently ignoring the demands of every oppressed movement. Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are in no way progressive – they’re the most progressively apologetic for reaction. 

But there are no social gains independent of genocides, in the era of many genocides. The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of decaying, moribund capitalism – it is absolutely a fetter upon continued social development. It is abating any forces of progress. It is a hindrance – not a tool with which to reach a preferred end. There can only be progression with its destruction. And when imperialism reaches rabid stages of genocides, multiple genocides, it is calling for its own gravedigger. 

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

The material force of oppression in bourgeois society is also its spiritual force of oppression. In the epoch of many genocides it has never been a greater spiritual force of oppression than now.

The colonialist bourgeoisie has successfully reduced politics down to papers and ballots. Chauvinism is abundant and the many genocides are now to the chauvinists less important than their little medal of democracy. Politics in the empire is materially for genocide insofar as it is rhetorically for democracy.

We need a truly internationalist proletarian party. It is time to consolidate communist organizations of the oppressed, of the lumpenproletariat, of the super exploited and colonized masses, of Indigenous people — which will be the first really communist party, which will first and foremost, and primarily and always (until the epoch is truly over, until we have smashed it with our hands), struggle against the many genocides, always in relation to the genocides. 



This is for all land back. This is for the death of the zionist entity. This is for freeing the Land and New Afrika. This is for Hawaiian independence and all the rest of the colonies of the yankee empire. This is for the end of the yankee empire and for Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. This is for a globalized intifada. This is for Nasrallah, Khaliifah Williams, Ismail Haniyeh,  and all of our martyrs.
All of this constitutes what is actually important, what is practically the most important. This title does not allot itself to the “democracy” of hypocrisy.

And all politics which does not see this, which does not accept this, which does not struggle around all of this all of the time, is a politics which is as good as dead, just as “democracy” in the yankee empire is as good as dead. There is no room for saying otherwise. There must be the reconsolidation of the movement along the lines of the most awakened and oppressed peoples imprisoned herein because in them lies our only hope. 
The movement must learn to disrupt business as usual, to disrupt settler, imperialist, chauvinist politics as usual, to disrupt “democracy” as usual. In this fascist empire we have to knock down bourgeois democracy, not protect it. Every protection of it is 100 more state executions, 100 more million dollars to the zionist entity, 100 more immigrant families deported. There are no more excuses for passivity. 

We must stop wasting time and start committing to gaining in this task now. We must make daily gains in this task starting now. And if we do not do this, we are going for barbarism.

We are on the path to barbarism now.
 We have a duty to get off this path.



We cannot waste any more time.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

There will be more.

We cannot let there be more.