In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 22, the U.S. government joined Israel’s unprovoked aerial war on Iran, aimed — primarily — at destroying the country’s uranium enrichment facilities. This imperialist^[1] war has further destabilized the Middle East, set back any prospects for the Iranian people to eventually rid themselves of the oppressive regime in Tehran, and may contribute to new blows against the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond.

The Israeli air force launched surprise bombing raids on June 13, using about 200 U.S.-supplied F-35 and other fighter jets, which attacked key Iranian military and nuclear sites. Prior to the aerial assault, Mossad, Israel’s notorious spy agency, had smuggled drones into Iran that took out much of the country’s air defense system.

From the war’s opening hours, Israeli forces also targeted civilian neighborhoods in Tehran and other cities to assassinate Iran’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists. Collateral damage has included more than 500 Iranians killed and over 3,000 wounded so far. Some human rights groups have estimated the Iranian death toll as high as nearly 1,000.

Israel launched the war on Iran after getting the U.S. president’s approval — “authorization that likely would not have come from any U.S. president in the past two decades, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or even George W. Bush,” as journalist Amos Harel accurately put in a news analysis in the Israeli daily Haaretz on June 22.

EDITORIAL

Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles and drones. A number of them evaded Israel’s missile defenses, hitting Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other Israeli cities. These strikes have resulted in at least 24 deaths and over 592 injuries, proving once again that — far from being a refuge — the Israeli state is a death trap for the Jews.

The U.S. aerial strike targeting Fordow and two other nuclear installations — in Natanz and Isfahan — marked a significant advance in the objectives of Israel’s war in Iran. The main goal of the war was to inflict maximum damage to Iran’s nuclear program. While the Israeli government and its U.S. and European allies accused Iran of enriching uranium to make atomic weapons, Tehran insisted its nuclear program was needed for peaceful purposes, to produce energy — which Iran has every right to do.

No official assessment of the destruction from the U.S. bombings has yet been released. But it is reasonable to assume that the 30,000-lb “bunker buster” munitions dropped by B-2 stealth bombers penetrated deep underground, likely causing extensive damage at Fordow and Natanz — devastation that Israel could not have achieved on its own.

The Israeli assault on Iran, with Trump’s clear endorsement and encouragement, and the subsequent U.S. entry into the war, show that Israel continues to have a role for U.S. imperialism that no other regime in the region can play. Israel has the most powerful and effective military and spy agencies. No other government in the region — including the Arab Gulf monarchies Trump courted for investments in his recent trip — comes even close.

With each new use of their military power the Israeli leaders are emboldened to go further. Israel is indispensable for safeguarding and advancing throughout the Mideast the interests of the wealthy families that rule the United States and other imperialist countries. That’s why London and Washington aided the early Zionist movement in establishing Israel as a colonial settler state and support it fully as it has evolved today.^[2]

That’s why U.S. president Donald Trump has openly called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, people who have been devastated by Israel’s genocidal war for nearly two years. Such expulsions, effectively leading to the expansion of the Zionist state, are more likely in the aftermath of this war, as the Israeli right is emboldened to pursue its abhorrent objectives.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent months pushed forcefully for war on Iran after years of advocating for it. Netanyahu took two major gambles — both of which, so far, appear to have paid off, strengthening his right-wing government and increasing his chances of re-election.

Netanyahu first bet that Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election last November would open a rare window of opportunity in Washington. Trump did in fact give him the green light to initiate the Israeli attack on Iran. Trump had recently conducted negotiations with Tehran, but he quickly concluded that a nuclear deal with Iran was unlikely as Washington insisted on zero uranium enrichment among other onerous terms, which would have handcuffed Iran’s nuclear industry. That laid the groundwork for Trump’s support for the Israeli assault, which Netanyahu was unlikely to pursue without U.S. backing.

Netanyahu’s second gamble was anticipating that an Israeli strike would draw in the U.S. military. That scenario also materialized, and from a position of strength for the Zionist regime. The initial Mossad operations and Israeli Defense Force bombings met many of their destructive goals, with no effective resistance from Iran. Although Israel had not yet won the war, Trump joined the fray, contradicting previous promises and “isolationist” positions of many of his prominent backers in his MAGA base.

Since 2015, Trump has repeatedly promised that, under his leadership, Washington would avoid unnecessary wars in the Middle East. So now, he attempts to present the U.S. bombings of Iran as a one-time operation, while simultaneously threatening even more devastating attacks, if Iran retaliates against U.S. forces, and even contemplating “regime change” in Tehran.

Whether Trump’s narrative of a “one-time” operation holds depends on the true extent of the damage caused by Sunday’s bombings and Iran’s response.

Iranian officials threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking off commercial traffic from the Persian Gulf. Roughly 20% of the world’s petroleum passes through that narrow strait.

In nearby Yemen, the Iranian-allied Houthis broke a ceasefire with Washington, declaring the U.S. bombing of Iran was an act of war. Ongoing Houthi assaults on ships have stopped most commercial traffic through the Red Sea and Suez Canal for more than a year.

On June 23, the Iranian regime launched missiles at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East. All the missiles were intercepted, and no injuries of U.S. personnel or of Qataris resulted. The strikes appeared to be a face-saving operation for Tehran. They were calibrated to minimize confrontation, as Iran gave early warning of the coming projectiles.

In the aftermath of that Iranian attack, Trump announced a ceasefire to the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, thanking Tehran “for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured.” The ceasefire may be tenuous, however. As this editorial is published, fire between Israel and Iran continued.

These developments indicate the substantial weakening of the Iranian regime. As World-Outlook noted in a news analysis in January, Tehran and its allies in Iran’s reactionary “axis of resistance” were severely set back with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last year and the decimation of Hezbollah — Iran’s main proxy in the Middle East. The Iranian regime also lost a land corridor to Lebanon with the overthrow of the Assad dictatorship in Syria last December.

As Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian American scholar and author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine, explained last fall in a videotaped interview, available on YouTube, Iran’s “axis of resistance” had nothing to do with Palestinian national aspirations.

“There was an axis,” Khalidi said. “It was essentially created by Iran as a deterrent to protect the Iranian regime… That was what their alliance with Syria was for, that was what their support for Hezbollah was for, that was what their support for Hamas was for, and that’s why Iran supported Assad and the so-called Houthis in Yemen. Each of those actors had a degree of independence, they weren’t Iranian clones or controlled by Iran, but Iran supported them, massively, at a huge cost.”

After these forces were significantly weakened, and the Trump administration signaled its willingness to back a “preemptive strike” against Tehran, the Israeli regime took the opportunity to strike. Entering the war with formidable weapons also gave the Trump administration a chance to showcase the prowess of the U.S. military as a warning to any state or other actor that may stand up to Washington in the Middle East and beyond.

The current Israeli-led war has further degraded Iran’s military capabilities. Russia and China, which opposed the U.S.-Israeli assault and have economic ties with Iran, did not offer Tehran any military assistance.

The clerics ruling Iran are now circling their wagons to maximize their chances of holding on to power. They will likely use the U.S.-Israeli attacks to stoke nationalist sentiment, and crack down on opponents, for that purpose.

The people of Iran, and all working people in the Middle East, however, will only benefit from an immediate cessation of hostilities and an end to the U.S.-backed Israeli war. Those of us in the belly of the beast should demand: Hands off Iran. U.S. out of the Mideast. Israel out of Gaza and the West Bank. End U.S. aid to Israel.

NOTES

[1] Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. It became predominant at the dawn of the 20^th century. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin gave this economic system the most apt definition in his famous work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916. Imperialism is marked by five basic features, Lenin said: “(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies, which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital,’ of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations, which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.”

At the second congress of the Communist International in July 1920, a report on the work of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions summarized the further development of imperialism this way: “The characteristic feature of imperialism consists in the whole world, as we now see, being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces. The vast majority of the world’s population…belong to the oppressed nations…This idea of distinction, of dividing the nations into oppressor and oppressed, runs through the theses.”

[2] Israel today is a capitalist state based on Jewish supremacy in which Arab Israelis — about 21% of the country’s population — are second-class citizens. It is a state that has used Zionist settlements to turn the West Bank from an occupied territory to an apartheid-like conquest. It is a state carrying out a brutal war against Palestinians in Gaza — having confined 2 million Palestinians in unlivable zones comprising barely 20% of the strip’s small territory, after killing more than 56,000, injuring nearly 132,000 Palestinians, and turning into rubble much of Gaza — where it is using food as a weapon and committing other crimes against humanity.

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