Bombs will never bring freedom.

Since the U.S. and Israel’s attacks on Iran last week, nearly a dozen countries across the region have been dragged into a war that threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people. In Iran, the United States and Israel have already killed over 1,348 people and injured more than 17,000. In Lebanon, they have killed approaching 500 people, injuring and displacing hundreds of thousands.

Amidst the online noise, media propaganda, and the terrifying prospect of an escalated regional war, what guides us as we continue to mobilize for Palestinian liberation, and for collective liberation for all?

In this week’s Wire:

• On the ground: an overview of the week of war
• The U.S./Israeli end game: genocide and hypercapitalist imperialism
• True international solidarity with the Iranian people.

On the ground: an overview of the week of war

On the ground: an overview of the week of warTwice in the last year, the U.S. and Israel have used diplomatic talks with Iran as a cover to bomb the country.

As it bombs Tehran, the Israeli state is also instigating region-wide war, advancing its expansionist and genocidal objectives by bombing and invading the south of Lebanon and intensifying its siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

More than 1,348 Iranians have been killed by the U.S.-Israeli attacks, and the UN reported over 100,000 Iranians fleeing Tehran during only the first two days of the U.S. and Israel’s bombardment of the city of over 10 million people. A U.S. bombing of a girls’ primary school in Minab killed more than 180 children. Other bombs have targeted Iranian hospitals, medical infrastructure, and residential buildings, with residents in Tehran describing an “apocalyptic” scene of destruction and clogged highways as people seek to flee from U.S.-Israeli airstrikes.

The U.S./Israeli end game: genocide and hypercapitalist imperialism

The U.S./Israeli end game: genocide and hypercapitalist imperialismSince attacks began on Iran, bombs have fallen on UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, Iraq, and Cyprus — among others.

The Israeli military has repeatedly bombed and invaded southern Lebanon throughout its genocide of Palestinians. In the past week, the Israeli military has bombed neighborhoods across Beirut and more than 60 villages in southern Lebanon. As of this writing, the death toll in Lebanon approaches 500. As Israel prepared to expand a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, it has ordered a mass evacuation order for all residents across the south of the Litany River. Nearly 700,000 Lebanese have been displaced across the country under Israeli invasion, with those in the south reporting the constant presence of Israeli drones overhead and sharing videos of clogged roads and destroyed buildings as people flee the Israeli invasion.

At the same time, the Israeli military has used the cover of the war it started to accelerate its genocide of Palestinians, closing all crossings and checkpoints into and across Gaza and the West Bank and bombing refugee camps in Rafah and Khan Yunis. Medical evacuations have been fully shut down, and critical food aid is being blocked from entering Gaza, which will lead directly to a renewed starvation crisis within Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli state has imposed an accelerated siege, closing roads, trapping and preventing even urgent medical transit for Palestinians. Fully backed by the military, Israeli settlers continue to accelerate their campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities.

The U.S.-Israeli end game

The U.S. and Israel’s shared interest in carrying out this illegal war of aggression against Iran is to further remake the region in the image of their own interests, in service of their political and economic power. The U.S.-backed Israeli genocide and mass ethnic cleansing in Palestine is only one part of this grand strategy, the long-term goal of which is to bring the entire region under a hypercapitalist U.S. and Israeli dominated order.

This can already be seen in Trump’s “Board of Peace” plans for Gaza’s future: U.S. and Western billionaires cashing in while Palestinians are forced into hyper-surveilled concentration camps.

This grand strategy places Israel as the U.S.’s local policeman and resident weapons supplier to the region, where any opposition to the dominance of the U.S. and its political-economic interests is crushed. Iran has long stood in the way of these plans for U.S.-Israeli control of the region, opposing Israeli expansion and the normalization of relations between Israel and neighboring Arab states.

From our position in the U.S., in the belly of the beast, we must build a mass anti-war movement that will bring about an immediate end to the U.S. and Israel sowing death and destruction across the entire region and the world.

True international solidarity with the Iranian people.

True international solidarity with the Iranian people.At a recent JVP Power Half-Hour, Manijeh Moradian addressed attendees on the US-/Israeli bombardment of Iranian civilians, the Iranian people’s fight for self-determination under both imperial bombardment and a brutally oppressive regime, and the tasks ahead for true international solidarity.

The US and Israel want to eliminate any threat to their hegemony in the region.

Make no mistake, this war is not about:

• Fighting terrorism
• Stopping nuclear proliferation (Iran does not have nuclear weapons; the US and Israel do) - Liberating women
• Paving the way for democracy in Iran

The first mass casualties reported were at a girls’ school in southern Iran. There are now reports that the US and Israel have bombed multiple hospitals and residential buildings in Iran. This is what they do in Gaza. This is what they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is what they are doing in Iran.

We need an anti-war movement that:

• Rejects imperialism and domestic authoritarianism at the same time
• Stands in solidarity with the popular democratic mobilizations of Iranians who have risen up over and over again to liberate themselves

We need an alternative to war, to Zionism, and to fascism. And one of the most powerful expressions of that alternative was the Women Life Freedom movement — the animating vision of the feminist uprising in Iran between 2022 and 2023.

This was an unprecedented feminist revolutionary movement that galvanized and attempted to transform Iranian society from the bottom up.

The Women Life Freedom movement was a movement for:

• Self-determination and bodily autonomy
• Democracy and equal rights
• against prisons, censorship, ethnonationalism, and militarism

Tragically, rather than grant a single structural reform, the Iranian state unleashed tremendous violence — live ammunition, mass imprisonment, torture, and executions — to crush that movement.

If we want to support an alternative to Zionism, imperialism, and authoritarian state violence, we have to oppose this war of foreign aggression against Iran and the war the Iranian state has been waging against its own people.

In this moment of chaos, death, and tremendous ideological confusion, this is the task ahead of us. It’s not easy. It’s hard to sum up in a pithy slogan or chant. But we have to try.

We have to try to put out a message of:

No war. No authoritarianism. Solidarity with Iranian people’s self-determination. Bombs will never bring freedom.

Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor at Barnard College. She is the author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, and has been an anti-war activist for many years, serving on the United for Peace and Justice organizing committee for the February 15, 2003 global protest against the US invasion of Iraq. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network which formed in fall 2022 to support the women, life, freedom uprising in Iran.

Tell Congress: No War on Iran

Tell Congress: No War on Iran

The US and Israel have launched military attacks and war on Iran–a country of 90 million people. Now, reports indicate that Trump might call on Congress to approve $50 billion in military funding to expand this immoral and illegal U.S-Israel war of aggression.

Use this tool from JVP Action to tell Congress to block ANY funding for this war on Iran.

Tell Your Senators: No Funding for ICE

Tell Your Senators: No Funding for ICE

On Friday, February 13th funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expired. Though reporting suggests that DHS is “shutdown” agencies that make up DHS including ICE and CBP can still operate at full force thanks to the billions that were given to DHS through last year’s reconciliation bill.

Use this tool from Detention Watch Network (DWN) and JVP Action to tell your Senators to vote NO on funding for ICE and CBP.

*What we’re reading: *

staying current & going deep on Iran

HRANA: Human Rights Activists News Agency

At JVP, we follow the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) for reliable news from the ground in Iran.

Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom

Contributors trace how long-term neoliberal restructuring, sanctions-conditioned accumulation, ethnonational governance, ecological breakdown, and the systematic destruction of collective political capacities reshape what becomes thinkable as “politics” and what gets offered as a “solution. Edited by Ida Nikou and Manijeh Moradian.

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