Tag: Syria

Syria: Regime Change funded by US and Israel. Drive Imperialists out of West Asia region!

Al Jolani’s makeover from ISIS/Al Qaeda terrorist killer to ‘moderate rebel’ by Western/Zionist media

Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 15th December 2024. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.

The fall of Syria’s government is the most important event geopolitical even since 7th October 2023- the Gaza breakout led by Hamas. It is a defeat for the Axis of Resistance, the Iranian led anti-imperialist bloc that has been the only body that has delivered real physical solidarity with the Palestinians in the past year of genocide in Gaza, and its spread by degrees to the West Bank. Three different forces have taken military action against Israel, to varying degrees, to challenge Israel’s proclaimed ‘right’ to slaughter the Palestinians. They are: the Amanullah movement in Yemen (Houthis), Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Islamic Republic in Iran.

All three of these components of the Axis of Resistance are groups of Islamist origin, based on the Shi’a, the smaller of the two major confessional groups in Islam. Obviously as Marxists and atheists, we do not endorse the ideology of these movements – they do not represent our politics. However, we do support the resistance of the Palestinian people against genocide, and any movement that resists genocide is given credit where due by Marxists. The ideologies of these movements are not ours, but if they take actions against oppression, the basis exists for communists to work alongside their supporters in struggles to resist oppression and genocide.

We do not regard such bourgeois-religious movements as monolithic – we give credit where due in terms of any progressive evolution among them. And it should be noted that they have actively opposed religious sectarianism over the past period. The breakout from the Gaza concentration camp, which is now an extermination camp that rivals Auschwitz, was led by Hamas, a Sunni Islamic movement, albeit one with a de-facto bourgeois national-liberationist programme. We do not share the politics of Hamas either, of course. But we do support the Palestinian people’s right to resist genocidal incarceration in a giant murder camp. This is a progressive struggle notwithstanding the religious illusions of the cadres and masses involved.

Not all the Palestinians fighting for their rights are Muslims. A large minority are orthodox Christians, and Zionism has massacred them also. All acts of resistance against ethnic persecution by Zionists on the part of Arab Muslims, Christians, or people of no religion, are progressive, and Marxists seek to fight alongside them against oppression by the method of the united front. So, we applaud and embrace the anti-sectarian impulse of the Axis of Resistance, where Shi’a Iranians, Lebanese and Yemenis stood up to the Zionists and championed the cause of mainly Sunni and Christian Palestinians. In that sense, Marxists regard themselves as critical supporters of this as an aspect of the anti-imperialist united front. This is support for anti-imperialism, not religious ‘radicalism’.  The non-sectarianism is a progressive move away from the logic of religious ‘radicalism’ into the realm of secularism, which is a key part of the communist, genuinely anti-imperialist worldview. Other religious ‘radicals’ particularly among the Sunni confessional group appear very much into anti-Shi’a, anti-Christian sectarianism, as we can see from the actions of HTS, as supported by Türkiye, the US and Israel. More on that later.

We also note that a lesser, but still very important role, was played in this de-facto anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist united front by the Syrian government under Assad. It may not have been obvious, as there were no spectacular military actions by Syria against Israel. But the repeated armed attacks by Israel on Iranian military people and diplomatic premises in Syria indicate the role Syria was playing in helping the supply of Iranian military and other support to Hezbollah. The Assad regime was, in a low-key manner, allowing its territory to be used as a bridge between Iran and those in Lebanon who wanted to act to defend the Palestinians. This was and is very important. It is now under threat from the rise to power of sectarian, imperialist-backed jihadists in Syria.

Like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – or Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant, who have said that their only enemies are Iran and Hezbollah, not Israel. In the context of the genocide against the Palestinians, that is treasonous. Since HTS have seized power in Syria, there have been bans on the celebration of Christmas by the numerous Syrian Christians, and massacres of Alwites, the smaller Shi’a grouping that the Assad family also belonged to. Druze also are now living in fear of reprisal. And the Kurdish population in the North and East of Syria, who have often in the past sought Western support for their struggles for separation, or at least autonomy, are under attack, not from Assad, but from the sectarian Sunni elements. The Assad Ba’athist regime in the past, for all its austere repressive aspects, prided itself on its secularism and refusal to persecute communities on religious grounds.  It gained popular support from this.

It did not tolerate Kurdish separatism, and Kurds were oppressed and discriminated against as in all the national states that include significant Kurdish populations in the region. But even Kurds at times regarded Assad as a lesser evil to jihadist Sunni sectarians. That is a national question, and though we are for the right to self-determination of the Kurds, that does not derogate from the right to self-determination of the Arab peoples of the Middle East, which is particularly at stake in questions related to the genocidal colonial project of Zionism.

Whose entire basis is the forcible confiscation of Palestinian land and the ethnic cleansing, and indeed destruction of the Palestinian people. And because of the similarity of the Palestinian people to the other Arab populations of the region, Israel has an intrinsic tendency to seek to destroy every strong Arab or even sympathetic Muslim country in the West Asia/Middle East region. This is because they know full well that they are guilty of genocidal crimes against Arabs, and completely naturally, Arabs and other sympathetic Muslim peoples will seek to overturn this oppression and destroy the Jewish-supremacist, Zionist project.

Zionism has a disproportionate power and influence among the imperialist countries of the West. This is simply based on the disproportionate numerical preponderance of Jews in the Western ruling classes, compared to the number of Jews in the population. This is a legacy of many centuries before capitalism when Jews played an economic role as a commodity-trading middleman class within the feudal, natural economy. This made Jews particularly suited culturally for particular roles in the capitalist ruling classes that succeeded feudalism. What it also provides is a material basis for the disproportionate role of the Israel lobby today. Israel as a state was created to benefit that very sizeable Jewish layer of the imperialist bourgeoisie.  Even if they do not live there, they tend to regard it as their state. It is a transplanted imperialist enclave with its own imperialist interests. All of Israel was taken from the Arab people by genocidal means.

In a way, this sums up the main issues in the Middle East: – the film Wall Street was the epitome of neoliberalism from the 1980s, with its character Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, remembered for the notorious soundbite that “Greed is Good”. When imperialist politicians, such as Starmer, Biden, Blinken, Trump, etc., say that Israel is only ‘defending itself’ when it commits some outrageous massacre or act of aggression against neighbouring Arab peoples, they are solidarising with a state founded on genocide. What they are actually saying is “Genocide is Good”.

There is a coalition of interests here. That of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie, both in Israel and the wider imperialist countries, who have a direct interest in Israel’s land theft and genocidal practices. Gaza was only the culmination of this (so far). And also, the more general colonialist interests of the imperialist powers, and their desire to possess, and where they do possess, to hang on to, the natural resources of the West Asia/Middle East region, notably oil, which in many cases they seized in the 20th or even the 19th centuries. The two cross-fertilise, so you see hybrid forms, like virulent evangelical Christian Zionists in the US, as virulent in their genocidal anti-Arab views as Netanyahu. Fellow travellers of Zionism. Or you see European imperialist Zionists such as Starmer, arising from the pro-imperialist social democracy, well-bribed by the Zionist lobby.  That is the context of the wars and genocides in the Middle East, and it is also the context of what has happened in Syria.

 The social basis of some forms of religious ‘radicalism’ in Muslim countries has frequently come from two sources – the older, conservative landlord type classes, often rooted in the remains of pre-capitalist modes of production. While these may be socially backward and obsolete, they still wield considerable social power, because imperialist capitalism in the West, in its colonising activities, seeks to suppress native capitalist development in the colonial and former colonial countries. They are still able to do this in many places that are formally decolonised, by their control of the mainsprings of finance, or their ownership, either direct or indirect, of important economic resources in former colonial countries.

Afghanistan was a case in point – when a reformist, pro-USSR government came to power in 1978, the West were able to initiate a jihad against it using reactionary Islamic forces that had their starting point in the pre-capitalist landlord class. The question of women’s rights, and the bride price, was basic and what started the war. This was the starting point of the Mujahedin, who waged a holy war against the PDPA and then the USSR which backed them with military force between 1979 and 1988.

There are also layers of the educated middle class who can be drawn to such ‘radicalism’ as for all their education, there are few outlets for their employment. So, jihadism has become a movement of an ostensibly modernist middle class, who seek to update these religious concepts and make a modern movement out of them. Such movements can veer to the left, often in contradictory ways, such as the Mujahedin E-Khalq in Iran, who defined themselves as ‘Islamic Marxists’ in the period of the 1978-9 Iranian Revolution. But they subsequently sold themselves to just about any enemy of Khomeini’s regime, first to Saddam Hussein, and later to the CIA. It is arguable that there have been elements of left populism, mixed with conservative Islamic sentiment, in the Iranian regime as well as Hezbollah and the Houthi. Others, particularly among the Sunni radicals, have tended to be more uniformly right-wing and sectarian, starting with Al Qaeda, which grew out of the Afghan jihad against the USSR, and had a peculiar love-hate relationship with both US imperialism and the Zionists. Bin Laden and his followers were trained by the CIA particularly for war against the USSR. But they turned against the US, seemingly in the most dramatic ways. They also sometimes expressed antipathy for Israel, yet they were evidently, and knowingly, used by Zionists.

With the bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in the late 1990s, bloody attacks that mainly killed black Africans. And then 9-11, the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon in 2001. And yet there was the cover-up of US foreknowledge of these attacks. And valid grounds to suspect Israeli foreknowledge and involvement. The political, Islamophobic hysteria in the imperialist countries was self-evidently manipulated by imperialism, and gave the opportunity for the US to use this to not only invade Afghanistan (where Al Qaeda and Bin Laden were based) but also to invade Iraq. Afghanistan did not really matter to Zionists. But Iraq certainly did. The 9-11 attacks provided the opportunity for pro-Israel US neocons to enlist US imperialism more generally to destroy Iraq.

And out of the destruction of Iraq, and particularly the US destruction of Fallujah with chemical and radiological weapons, you saw the further mutation of an Al Qaeda movement that had emerged after the invasion and killing of Saddam, into something even worse. Islamic State is an Islamic version of the Khmer Rouge, a product of collective psychological derangement, which was prepared to slaughter anyone and anything that got in their way. But like the original Khmer Rouge, they were still capable and willing to be bribed by imperialism. All these forces were mobilised by imperialism in Syria since the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011.

The Arab Spring was a spontaneous, many-country upsurge of democratic protest at the repressive and anti-democratic nature of most of the bourgeois regimes in the Arab world. It briefly convulsed many countries, with ‘radical’ and conservative Arab regimes. It was a naïve upheaval, and easy for the imperialists to co-opt. In countries with pro-Western regimes, such as Egypt, it was indulged for a while, and then crushed.  The Egyptian masses were allowed to elect as President Mohammad Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, who then as soon as the movement had been demobilised, was overthrown and executed in a bloody coup led by General Sisi. In Libya, the movement was rapidly co-opted into an imperialist intervention that destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa, murdered its ‘radical’ bourgeois leader Qaddafi – who the Zionists hated for his support for Palestinian causes — and collapsed the society, which ended up ridden with slave markets. They attempted to do the same to Syria, but failed, because of the intervention of Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, who put a stop to these attacks.

So that is what the Syrian civil war that has raged since 2011, was about. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which had engaged in bloody armed conflict with the Assads earlier, under Bashir Assad’s father Hafez, was co-opted by the pro-Turkish, pro-Western campaign that included Al Qaeda. The Erdogan government’s antipathy to Assad was in part because of their rejection of the project of an oil pipeline from Qatar, through Türkiye into Europe, which would enrich Türkiye. The demonisation of Assad is bullshit. Assad’s regime was no worse than most other bourgeois nationalist governments in the Global South.  Why don’t the Zionists and neocons who rant on about the supposed evil of Assad have anything to say about the monstrous terror of the Sisi regime in Egypt, which executed the only elected president in Egyptian history, Morsi? Because Sisi is an ally of Israel. The Assad regime rejected such alliances with Israel. The war against it was not waged because of its alleged barbaric, repressive features, but because it resisted cooperation with imperialism and Zionism. When these people start talking about morality and freedom, look at their bottom line – profit from imperialism.

So, what is the outcome of this? Syria has collapsed into chaos. Sectarian murder stalks the land. The Assad regime eventually succumbed to sanctions, which since Syria had no significant oil reserves of its own, it was not able to counter indefinitely. Eventually it could not pay its troops, so its army would not fight. Its defenders, such as Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, were tied up in military conflicts, in Ukraine and with Israel, and were unable to do much to aid it. So, it collapsed in the face of the HTS offensive from its enclave in Idlib. And Israel has launched the most incredible, piratical armed campaign to wipe out Syria’s armed capacity, its weaponry, its military bases, its navy, etc. Suddenly, the HTS, led by Al-Jolani, (who actually wears clothes branded as ‘made in Israel’, which is why in his rebranded attire he appears to resemble Zelensky, another imperialist stooge) is complaining to the UN that Israel’s attacks are against ‘international law’. No shit, Sherlock!

The HTS is said to be a split from Al Nusra, the Syrian Al Qaeda group, but in fact is really a reshuffle of names and a re-branding. Just a few days earlier, they proclaimed that their only enemies were Iran and Hezbollah, and Israel was no problem for them – they sought friendly relations with it. They also talked about democracy and a new constitution. Cynical talk, when they are slaughtering adherents of the ‘wrong’ religion. They announced that Syria would henceforth be run on free market principles, as opposed to the (at least) nominal adherence to planning by the Syrian Ba’athists. They then decreed that no woman can be a judge, which was commonplace under the supposedly evil Assad regime. Any court case with a women judge would have to change to a male judge. They decreed that 400,000 Shi’a, who gained Syrian citizenship under the last 50 years under the rule of the Ba’ath Socialist Party, would be deprived of citizenship and expelled. Thousands of such people are fleeing Syria as we speak. Meanwhile the West has begun sending back Syrian refugees, as Syria is supposedly ‘safe’ now it is ruled by ISIS types. The persecuted of today, victims of Western proxies, will be refused asylum in the West, whereas those who supported the proxies were given asylum. HTS also decree that journalists who reported for the Assad regime will be punished – i.e. slaughtered. So, this is democracy: economics for the wealthy, legally mandated oppression of women, persecution of minorities, murder of press people.

Calling this ‘democracy’ is complete nonsense. But the Syrian population may well have other ideas. A fight around democracy against the CIA/Zionist jihadi stooges is quite likely in due course. And if there is one thing that Zionism fears above all in the Arab world it is democracy. They fear it because the Arab peoples of the region regard the Zionist regime as their most dangerous enemy. All their allies in the region are the most brutal dictatorships, with Sisi’s Egypt, and the Royal dictatorships in Jordan and Saudi Arabia in pride of place. In places where there is even a modicum of democratic space, such as Lebanon, militant opponents of Zionism, such as Hezbollah, rapidly become dominant. In an environment where dictatorships are dominant, Assad as one of these who was hostile to Zionism was an anomaly. And the Sunni Islamists with their sectarian brutality and their aspiration to be clients of imperialism, are likely the source of another brutal dictatorship. In the post-Assad context, opposing these dictatorial trends and demanding the popular election of a government to stand up to Zionism and its genocidal Greater Israel aspirations, are crucial. We need the further elaboration of democratic demands, such as for a constituent assembly, not least to bury such pro-Zionist, dictatorial trends. The revolution against Zionism is inseparable from a permanent revolution of the Arab masses against their ruling classes, that has the potential to crack the Zionist fortress itself.

Syria: A tactical victory for the US and Israel – but will there be blowback?

Uniting the oppressed and overcoming the limits of the Axis of Resistance

Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

(Left) US Ukrainian Stooge Zelensky, (right) US Syrian stooge Al-Jolani, still a wanted Al Qaeda/ISIS terrorist (by the US) with a $10 million price on his head. Identikit makeovers.

The fall of the Syrian government is the most important geopolitical event since the Palestinian resistance attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. In the immediate term, it is a tactical victory for imperialism, and above all for Israel, for weakening the routes of weapons and financial resources destined for the guerrillas in Lebanon and Palestine and allowing the destruction of a political force that, after Iran, had the best arsenal to confront the Zionist entity.

Israel has effectively removed a potential entire front in the ongoing war against the resistance.  Iran has already demonstrated its capacity to hit Israel powerfully and directly but it has temporarily lost the ability to threaten Israel on its borders via its allies. Whilst Assad was not actively opening up the Golan Heights front in the last 14 months, the complete destruction of the Syrian Army, navy and air-force removes this potential for the for-seeable future.

It has greatly strengthened the government of Netanyahu and the “Greater Israel” fanatics in his government., who will be currently drunk with power and their hubristic supremacist ambitions will also become more emboldened with the coming to power to power of Trump. This could hasten the long term imperialist plans for war with Iran to “finish” their goals of “reshaping” West Asia.

However a dialectal examination of this immediate victory for imperialism reveals that it could be more fragile and temporary than first appears. The competing interests of regional powers such as Turkey, the forces of chaos unleashed and the unreliable nature of the jihadhist HTS forces might sow the seeds of blowback against imperialism in the long run. Facing mounting contradictions, every victory of imperialism in the current context creates potentially more contradictions and problems in the long term. 

Which side do Erdogan and HTS play on?

But this victory seems likely to be short-lived. One of the players most benefited by the fall of Assad in the region is Turkey. Turkey, ruled by Tayyip Recep Erdogan, is part of NATO, but does not enjoy the confidence of the imperialist federation, which attempted a military coup to overthrow it in 2016. Having survived the coup attempt, Erdogan has sought to carve out an autonomous space since the beginning of this cold war and even more so now in the first conflicts of World War III, to regain the influence he had until World War I, when the country ruled the Ottoman Empire.

Erdogan and Assad

Turkey knows that it can only play this autonomous role through winning mass support in the region by opposing the other players, especially the hated State of Israel. Not by chance, on the same day December 7, when Damascus fell, Iran, Russia and Turkey held a trilateral forum in Doha, when:

“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that he and the foreign ministers of Turkey and Iran agreed at a meeting in Doha that there should be an immediate end to “hostilities” in Syria, Reuters reports. Lavrov said Moscow wanted to see a dialogue between the Syrian government and what he called the “legitimate opposition” in Syria.” (https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241207-russias-lavrov-says-moscow-tehran-and-ankara-want-immediate-end-to-fighting-in-syria/)

The legitimate opposition to which the Russian minister refers is the one influenced by Turkey, which already after the fall of Assad clashed with the Syrian Democratic Forces, linked to the Kurds and supported by the US.

It would be a mistake to believe that the process is controlled by the US and Israel. It is the decadence of the imperialist system that feeds antagonistic aspirations in the bourgeoisie and governments of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which find themselves with the status of aspirants of the BRICS plus.

The mercenary group that took over Damascus, for example, the Sunni jihadist and Salafist Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS or Levant Liberation Organization), led by the Saudi national Abu Mohammed al-Jolani (who has returned to using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa), is in dispute. HTS continues to be designated by the U.N., U.S., U.K., and other countries as a terrorist organization, and the U.S. has retained a $10 million bounty for information on Jolani’s whereabouts.

The British government exhibits tensions about the HTS, and also reveals the hesitation of imperialism:

“Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said no decision had yet been made on whether the UK government could remove Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from a list of banned terrorist groups after rebels led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

‘We’ve all seen in other parts of history where we think there was a turning point, but that didn’t necessarily become the better future we hoped for,’ Sir Keir added.

(Too early to remove Syrian rebels from terror list – Starmer, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7qenxy8r2o)

For this reason, Iran and Hamas itself nurture expectations that the process as a whole may favor the Axis of Resistance in the medium term.

By the same expectation, even after the surrender without combat by the Syrian army, the Zionist IDF has bombed almost 500 times against strategic military positions in Syria under the justification of “preventing weapons from falling into the hands of terrorist elements”. Compared to Hezbollah, for example, the military apparatus of the Syrian army is far superior. Therefore, Israel, which has no reason to feel secure about the future of Syria, has been bombing fighter jets, helicopters, surface-to-air missile launchers and weapons manufacturing sites in Syria.

According to the US and Israeli agenda, the fall of the Syrian regime would allow the suppression of the presence of Russia, where it maintains two naval bases (Tartus and Latakia), cut off the arms and financial routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, contain the advance of China’s New Silk Road, isolate Iran, abort the growth of the BRICS in the region, while favoring Israel’s “new Middle East” plan and the oil and trade routes controlled by the imperialist system.

This is not the same agenda as Turkey, which took advantage of the disintegration of Syria to project its autonomous power in the midst of the crisis of the imperialist system and the new cold war to reestablish Turkish influence in the region, lost since the first world war. Ankara’s second objective is to suffocate the Kurdish communities, which are strongly opposed to it within Turkey and which have in the north and northeast of Syria a fertile ground to found Kurdistan. For this reason, pro-Turkish mercenaries are driving the Kurds out of the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor. At the same time, Russian military bases have not been attacked so far by what Lavrov called  the Syrian “legitimate opposition.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), feared by Israel as “the largest terrorist organization in the world,” has launched an appeal to the future Syrian government:

“There are some fundamental basic points on which any possible Iranian cooperation with the new Syrian government must be based:

– Agree on the prohibition of normalization between Syria and the Israeli enemy.

– Reject the Israeli incursion into Syrian territory and confront it by all means, including military means.

– Protect Syria’s religious minorities, not attack neighboring countries, prohibit terrorist activities, and cancel support for such activities.

Iran and the Axis of Resistance will support any non-sectarian Syrian government that rejects the Zionist regime, stands with the Palestinian people, and puts the issue of Palestine and its people among its priorities.’

Blowback is an expression of the lexicon of international intelligence since the beginning of the first Cold War (1949-1991) that refers to collateral effects that turn against secret operations of imperialism, such as, for example, the Iranian revolution (1979) resulting from a process of maturation of the struggle against the coup d’état promoted by the CIA in Iran, in 1953.

The attack by fundamentalist guerrillas, used by the US against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s, against the WTC in 2001 and the emergence of Al Qaeda would be another example of blowback. The current operation to overthrow the Assad regime, although quick and successful, also seems to be rapidly generating its blowback, due to the fact that immediately after the fall of Damascus, the same forces that united in the uprising, already began to fight each other for the booty.

Osama Bin Laden lauded by Western media for his anti-Soviet jihad

The internal contradictions of the collapse of the government favored a broad united front of antagonistic interests and this anti-Assad unity took a leap in quality when it concentrated a great tension against which there was no resistance. With the disappearance of the antagonist Assad, new contradictions are created within the ultra-heterogeneous front, disputing the booty.

The IDF, HTS, Free Syrian Army, Kurds, have already started to clash with each other. The first victors repressed have been the Kurds. Pro-Turkish mercenaries are driving the Kurds out of Deir ez-Zor through the ‘Syrian National Army’, aiming for control of Syrian oil. This process will directly or contradictorily feed the resurgence of the axis of resistance in Syria.

The Turkish and Saudi governments, as well as the militias they support in Syria, do not deserve the slightest trust on the part of the oppressed. But neither are they reliable agents for imperialism itself. The greatest proof of this is Israel’s intention to annihilate all the repressive apparatus that would be inherited from the Assad government by a future government of militias supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia. These contradictions can and should be taken advantage of by the Axis of Resistance as part of the policy of weakening imperialist control over the region. At the same time, the basic points presented by the IRGC to politically dispute the new Syrian government are reasonable.

How can a country that bravely resisted the onslaught of imperialism for 50 years fall like a house of cards in 10 days?

Neither the US, nor Israeli, nor Turkish armies, nor any guerrilla militia defeated the Syrian army; it was the economic war of imperialism that strangled the Arab state of Syria and its backbone, the army.

There was no defence. Damascus surrendered. Assad fled to Russia. Hundreds of military and leaders of the former government who were unable to flee to Iraq have been massacred. Now, the Syrian Arab State is being torn apart.

Syria is a West Asian country whose main natural resource is its own geostrategic location. Compared to its neighbors, Syria has almost no oil.  The country’s location is essential for all geopolitical movements between the three continents of the old world, especially between Europe and the Arabian Peninsula, bordering both Turkey and Iraq. Syria was the main supply route for the Axis of Resistance that connects Iran to Lebanon.

Syria has been an oppressed and rebellious country for more than half a century, when Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar al-Assad, of the Ba’ath party, representative of Arab nationalism and ally of the USSR, opposed the integration of the country into the imperialist system led by the US, as happened to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

Syria and the Soviet Union established a mutual protection agreement in 1971 that resulted in the installation of a Soviet naval base at Tartus during the Cold War, with the aim of supporting the Soviet Navy‘s 5th Operational Squadron in the Mediterranean, which the Soviets saw as a counterweight to the U.S. Sixth Fleet based in Italy.

Since then, imperialism has been trying to subjugate the country with sanctions. Syria was weakened in the 1990s with the end of the USSR and the imperialist offensive was increased during the “war on terror” (from 2001) of the USA, with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. This pressure has forced the political regime to become increasingly repressive against the insurgency sponsored by the US, Israel and Turkey, which culminated in the constitution of an opposition front, supported by the West, the Syrian National Council and the Syrian National Army (formerly known as the Free Syrian Army), which feeds on disaffection with, and defectors from, the Assad regime itself.

The Pentagon has established a strategic military base since 2016 in the country, the Al Tanf base, which today can count on a thousand soldiers. This insurgent movement will be boosted by bombings and military interventions camouflaged as a “civil war” that lasts from 2011 to 2018.

Unlike other oppressed countries that suffer from imperialism’s economic wars, Syria has suffered, cumulatively, sanctions, military intervention and more sanctions, such as the Caesar Law, imposed in 2020 by the US. Unlike other sanctioned countries, Syria, which was the third most sanctioned country in the world until 2022, does not have energy reserves like Venezuela, Russia or Iran that could remedy the expensive economic, social and human price of the blockade imposed by the imperialist system. Syria has an estimated reserve of approximately 2.4 billion barrels of oil. Saudi Arabia has about 297 billion, Iran 157 billion and Iraq 145 billion. And even with small energy reserves, these were already controlled by the enemy, directly by occupation troops of the US army or mercenary organizations that associated with the US, such as Kurds, the Islamic State, which in 2014 had managed to dominate most of the camps in eastern Syria, including the largest, Al Omar, also in Deir ez Zor. Oil sales have become one of the biggest sources of income for the Islamic State, generating about $40 million a month in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2017, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, also funded and armed by the U.S., took control of major oil fields in northeastern Syria and along the Euphrates River. In 2019, Donald Trump, then in his first presidential term, said that the United States expects to obtain millions in revenue from Syrian oil, at least $45 million per month. (https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-50514276).

Syria’s GDP fell from $68 billion in 2011 to $8 billion in 2020 (World Bank). 90% of the Syrian population is below the poverty line (UN). The average salary of Syrian soldiers was $7 a month and commanders were no more than $40 a month. And these were the best average salaries in the country. This misery was the result of a devastating economic war of sanctions that imposed the Cesar Law in 2020, against the country and third-party companies that traded with Syria. Until March 2022, Syria was the third most sanctioned country in the world (Statista). All of this has engendered the bankruptcy of the Syrian Arab state:

“According to the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC headquarters ‘Khatam al-Anbiyaa’: ‘Bashar al-Assad did not request Iranian help – in fact, he actively prevented us from going and helping’

“Bashar al-Assad said to one of our (Iranian) officials at a meeting: ‘My soldiers have become real smugglers or thieves, they only defend those who offer them bribes and privileges. They couldn’t defend me, and when I wanted to protect Damascus at least, I realized that they weren’t capable of protecting Damascus either.’

“Bashar al-Assad did not allow us (the IRGC) to go to help the Syrian Arab Army, although he had asked us for help in the past, but this time he not only did not ask, but was worried about our arrival, and said that ‘if you come, Israel will probably attack us’. (Middle East Spectator).

The demoralization and political backlash of the Assad government itself paved the way for the unhindered triumphal march of the pack of hostile forces to seize the Syrian state.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei

Syria’s victory against imperialism in 2018 was a victory for the world working class

The imperialist international and national military offensive has been contained by the military support of Iran and Russia. This containment of imperialism’s expansionist policy in Syria in 2018 was a milestone of the current Cold War, revealing the decline of the imperialist system’s military hegemony over the globe. It was a progressive process for the oppressed peoples and therefore should have been supported by all genuine communists and anti-imperialists. Syria’s victory against the “Arab Spring” and the “civil war” manipulated by imperialism between 2011 and 2018 was a victory for the world working class.

Between 2011 and 2024, Russia and Iran shielded the Assad government. In 2015, Russia made a new deal with Syria and built the Khmeimim airbase in Latakia to serve as “the strategic center of Russian military intervention on behalf of the Syrian government.” Russian military advisors, as well as those of Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah were essential in defeating the NATO forces’ plan to overthrow the “dictator Assad”, as they had done with Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. 

But, as of 2022, Assad’s two allied countries have been deeply involved in the two arenas where the cold war between NATO and the Eurasian bloc has already become hot and where the first outbreaks of a third world war have already broken out.

In this process, the weakened Assad government itself began to pursue a policy of reconciliation with the US, Israel and Turkey, taking a certain distance from Russia and Iran, reducing cooperation with the latter two.

“It is now widely known that Iran, Hezbollah and other Shi’ite factions asked Assad for permission to open a front in the Golan Heights after October 7 to support resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. However, Assad refused, reportedly saying that he did not want to drag Syria into a possible open confrontation with Israel and that he did not want to risk jeopardizing his normalization progress with the Gulf states. (Middle East Spectator).

In the past two years, Assad has come to believe that he can pacify his relations with the West, to take an increasingly neutral stance as the third world war escalates. This left the country more vulnerable to the action of all anti-Assad forces operating in Syrian territory and led to the demoralization of part of the armed forces themselves. Several commanders were bribed and co-opted by the West. State institutions were dissolving while the pro-imperialist opposition, defeated in 2018, was regaining strength.

Even so, both Russia and Iran have offered to support a Syrian counteroffensive. Assad was in Russia on November 29 to talk to Putin in person. But Assad and his government seemed to no longer want to play a leading role in defending the state against the pack of opponents.

Who is to blame for the fall of Damascus?

There are several disputes about who to blame for the fall of Syria: Russia, Iran or China, why did they not help the Assad government economically and militarily, or Assad, because it was not more democratic with the people or did not accept help from a foreign intervention to save it? We believe that the answer is none of the previous alternatives. Looking for culprits is a symptom of crisis on the losing side.

Many question whether wealthy China could not have prevented Syria’s economic collapse and prevented the situation from reaching this point.

In 2022, Syria joined China’s Belt and Silk Road project. In September 2023, Assad made his first official visit to China. At that time, the two countries announced a policy of strategic cooperation.

Xi Jimping offered economic aid from China to revive Syria’s economy. “China is willing to strengthen cooperation with Syria through the Belt and Road Initiative… to make positive contributions to regional and world peace and development,” Xi said (Xi Jinping offers help to Bashar al-Assad to rebuild Syria and regain regional status – https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/internacional/xi-jinping-oferece-ajuda-a-bashar-al-assad-para-reconstruir-siria-e-recuperar-status-regional/).

In 2024, China donated the equivalent of $10 million in communications equipment to Syria, as well as medical aid and assistance to Damascus. However, the strengthening of these relations seems not to have been enough to save the Syrian economy and state from multiple bankruptcy and the siege that resulted in its destruction.

Now China tends to lose a lot because with the end of the state of Syria as we know it, the US is getting closer to the realization of its strategic objective in the region, gaining a breathing space and delaying its decline by containing its loss of control in the Middle East, the core of the disputes for oil, the main energy matrix on the planet.

For months, Iran had been offering to bolster the Syrian defence forces. According to journalist Pepe Escobar, Iran said: we have two brigades. if you give the okay, it will take two weeks, for them to position themselves in Syrian territory, but they are available.

Another Iranian source presents the following picture of defection:

“Iran expected Assad to ask for military assistance, and we were prepared to respond…But such a request did not come. It became clear after Aleppo fell that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power.”

The fall of Aleppo marked a turning point. Iranian officials claim that Assad’s reluctance to act signalled his willingness to step down, a decision influenced by diplomatic efforts led by Russia and the United Arab Emirates. This development has left Iran with limited options, leading to a strategic pivot. (Iranian officials reveal Assad ignored warnings, https://slguardian.org/iranian-officials-reveal-assad-ignored-warnings/)

Apparently, the exhaustion of the country, its state, its armed forces and its social fabric was already too deep to resist a new military intervention like the one we are seeing now and Assad renounced the defense of the country, clearing the way for an easy conquest of Aleppo, Homes and Damascus for the dissolution of the state.

Faced with this scenario of multiple bankruptcy of the organs of the state and Syrian defenses, Putin must have thought the same as he said in 2015: “From now on, we will not be more Syrian than the Syrians themselves.” Подробнее: https://eadaily.com/en/news/2024/11/30/russians-dont-have-to-be-syrians-any-more-than-the-syrians-themselves-thoughts-about-the-failure-in-aleppo

Demonstrating that if the Syrians were not in a position to defend themselves, nor did they demand external aid, offered until the eve of the fall by the Russians and Iran, he did not want to pass himself off as an “armed missionary”.

Russian bases in Syria

Discussing the occupation of eastern Poland by the Red Army at Stalin’s behest, Trotsky makes the following observation:

“Robespierre once said that the people do not like missionaries with bayonets. By this, I meant that it is impossible to impose revolutionary ideas and institutions on other peoples by means of military violence. Logically, this idea, which is correct, does not mean that military intervention in other countries is inadmissible for the purpose of cooperating with a revolution.

“But such an intervention – as part of a revolutionary international policy – must be understood by the international proletariat, it must correspond to the wishes of the revolutionary masses into whose territory the revolutionary troops will enter. The theory of socialism in one country cannot, of course, create this active international solidarity, which alone is capable of preparing and justifying armed intervention. The Kremlin poses and solves the problem of military intervention, like all other questions of its policy, i.e., absolutely independently of the ideas and sentiments of the international working class. That is why the Kremlin’s recent diplomatic “successes” are monstrously compromising the USSR and introducing great confusion into the ranks of the world proletariat.” (L. Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, p. 43)

A military intervention in other countries by a workers’ state with the aim of cooperating with a revolution must correspond to the wishes of the revolutionary masses into whose territory the revolutionary troops are to enter. Even more confusion can be created by the intervention of a well-armed capitalist state, as part of a conflict with imperialism, on the territory of another oppressed capitalist country in the process of a pro-imperialist counter-revolution based on the deep erosion of the ruling capitalist dynasty, incapable of defending itself even militarily.

It is a good thing that Putin has no illusions in himself for being an armed missionary. Otherwise, it would favor imperialist war propaganda against Russia and the Axis of Resistance much more. Putin can offer resistance to the advance of imperialism on his borders, as he has been doing in Ukraine. It can, very progressively, help in the struggle against imperialist intervention as it did in Syria or in the new national liberation struggles agaisnt imperialist finance capital, as it did in Central Africa, but, by the bourgeois determinations of its own government, it does not go beyond that.

China seems to be waging an economic struggle with imperialism at the same time as it is arming itself for an eventual attack, defensively, against itself or for a final assault by imperialism on Taiwan. It merely develops its productive capacities as quickly as possible in order not only to meet the needs of its people, but also so that it can compete militarily but defensively with the West. China wants to win as well. It is interested in avoiding open confrontation with the West for as long as possible (perhaps they are under the illusion that they can avoid such confrontation indefinitely). While building up its armed forces, it wants to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union, which was partially exhausted from the incessant arms race with the West.

This means that it conducts its foreign policy in a very conservative way, pursuing its own national interest and trying not to antagonize the US. Of course, it does not want to develop an internationalist communist foreign policy, but through the BRICS and the belt and road, it is promoting an illusion of “multipolar” coexistence.

We can see that this plan has worked to help China achieve huge gains in recent decades, however, as the US and its allies become increasingly desperate in the face of China’s growing economic and military power, contradictions are coming to light. The U.S. will stop at nothing to prevent the emergence of this multipolar world that China is trying to build. We can see the existence of the brutality they are using to “reshape” West Asia to maintain their rule at the expense of China, where they are crushing states and committing genocide. What response does China have to this? Obviously, they stayed away from Syria and Libya to avoid antagonizing the West, but for how long can they continue the policy of avoiding conflict as the U.S. uses all its tools to maintain control of key regions and resources.

Iran is responsible for articulating a powerful international defensive system of resistance, but not of offensive to definitively defeat imperialism in the region and its Zionist puppet.

But the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves. This is the limit of the Anti-Imperialist United Front and the most formidable of the Axes of Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist Resistance. The events in Syria are a warning to that Marxists cannot rely on the rise of “multi-polar” world organically to occur.  The imperialists will stop at nothing in their “crash or crash through” approach and their “old” weapons of military violence and sanctions still have the potential to deliver gains even if they are contradictory and fluid. The economic powerhouse of China and BRICS and the Belt and Road initiative and the ongoing military power of Russia are significant boosts to the power of the international working class but the desperate dragon of imperialism is far from slain.

 No capitalist government in the world can meet the need for the construction of a New Communist International with sections in every country of the globe, to orchestrate from the inside out and from the outside the permanent socialist revolution, beyond the limitations established by each oppressed and cowardly bourgeoisie, to convert the defensive anti-imperialist struggle into an offensive socialist struggle that liberates the oppressed peoples and the working population of the planet from tragedies such as the that is taking place in Syria and that will be repeated in less or more tragic ways in the midst of the entry of the geopolitical situation into World War III.

Is Israel trying to provoke WWIII to stave off Gaza genocide defeat?

Support Iran’s right to self-defence!

Defend the Axis of Resistance, against Zionist/US/NATO bloc!

Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org   

In the early hours of Sunday, 14th April, Iran fired, in three waves, more than 300 drones, missiles and finally more sophisticated, possibly hypersonic ballistic missiles at Israel. Most of them appear to have been intercepted by Israel’s air defences or those of its imperialist allies, the US, France and Britain, except for the third wave, which significantly damaged Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev area, and an intelligence centre in the Golan Heights area, all of which were instrumental in Israel’s earlier act of aggression against Iran’s mission in Syria.

This retaliation was for the Israeli air attack on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria on 1st April, an annex of the Iranian Embassy itself. By the Vienna Convention, embassy buildings are regarded throughout the world as being part of the territory of the state the embassy serves. Israel’s attack on the Damascus building was thus regarded by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran as an attack on Iranian territory itself. It was an overt act of war and bound at some point to provoke some kind of Iranian military attack on Israeli territory.

The building Israel destroyed contained seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), including the commander of its Quds force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi. All-in-all 16 were killed by Israel. The presence of the senior IRCG figures was part of Iran’s military-political relationship with the Lebanese government, which includes the Shi’a resistance organisation Hizbullah, which has twice defeated near-genocidal Israeli invasions of Lebanon which massacred Palestinians and Lebanese Shia, going back as far as 1978. The Israelis scream that the presence of the highly efficient IRCG meant that the building was “not an embassy”, but every significant power in the world that has allies that it seeks to defend from third party attack uses diplomatic premises to further military collaboration with such allies.

Everyone knows that the CIA and Mossad habitually use US and Israeli Embassy buildings around the world to further their aims in terms of both military objectives and espionage. The criteria Israel tries to use to excuse attacking the Damascus Iranian Embassy could be used equally well to justify attacking every single US and Israeli Embassy on the planet. The Iranian military presence was part of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ to Israeli activities in West Asia, activities in pursuit of its aim of a Greater Israel though conquest and genocide of the Palestinian people and more besides, with some renderings of Greater Israel encompassing the whole of Jordan, most of Syria, Iraq up to the River Euphrates and Egypt up to the Nile.

In the case of Syria, everyone knows that Iran and Hizbullah not only defend Syria against direct US and Israeli aggression, but also have played a major role over more than a decade, along with Russia, in thwarting attempts by pro-imperialist jihadist proxies trying to reproduce the destruction of Libya by such proxies, and actual US, British and French intervention forces, in 2011 and after. It is now quite well known that Al Qaeda and ISIS reactionary jihadists have when wounded been given medical treatment by Israel.  The Israeli Islamophobic propaganda offensive against Hamas, accusing them of being akin to Daesh/IS, that they have waged since Oct 7th at the very least, can be defined according to the traditional Jewish term chutzpah, a classic rendering of which is the story of the man who murdered both his parents and then attempted to plead for mercy because he was now an orphan.

The Israeli attack was part not only of its current genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza, but also of this attempt to destabilise and destroy Syria. Iran is now de-facto an ally of Russia and China, both implicitly through its membership of the BRICS bloc, which it joined in January, but also though its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council. In that sense, this in turn carries echoes of not merely an anti-Iran agenda from the Zionist genocidaire regime, but also of an anti-Russian, anti-Chinese agenda that merges with the Zionist regime’s more traditional hatreds and obsessions, of Palestinians – of Muslim, Christian and other creeds — other local Arab peoples, and Arabs and other Muslim peoples more generally. Attacks on both Mosques and Churches during the genocide in Gaza, most notably the Al Aqsa Mosque itself, certainly indicate that. All these reactionary missions merge into one in terms of Israel’s attacks on Iran’s presence in Syria. And these occurrences, though they have some autonomy, fit in with the wider drive towards generalised conflict between the forces loyal to the US, seeking to preserve its worldwide imperialist hegemony, and those forces led by Russia and China seeking to reduce the US to just one part of a ‘multipolar world’.

Zionism Facing Defeat

The real nature of Israel is eminently visible in the genocidal murder of over 40,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the prison breakout of 7th October, the deliberate creation of a deadly famine through the blocking of food, water and fuel to Gaza, publicly announced in advance by the Israeli regime, by the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, healthcare, education facilities, etc., and the deliberate displacement through mass terrorisation of the overwhelming majority of its 2.3 million people. As well as the creeping extension of the methods Israel is using in Gaza to the West Bank and the massive wave of arrests, detentions, settler and state killings and ethnic cleansing that is escalating there also.

But the problem is that for all the genocidal slaughter it has carried out over the last six months, Israel is not winning in Gaza. It has failed to eliminate and defeat Hamas, instead its cowardly army has contented itself with massacring defenceless civilians, while absurdly claiming that it has no choice because Hamas supposedly hides among them as ‘human shields’. This has been the most reported and documented genocidal slaughter in history, even though Israel has murdered many journalists to try to suppress the news coming out. They have been unable to do so because of the ubiquity of social media and camera/mobile phone technology. Israel itself is not stable: there have been huge protests against Netanyahu’s overt corruption, his handling of the ‘hostage’ crisis, and the far-right nature of his regime over the last few months, even though much of it is on a chauvinist basis and does not touch the oppression of the Palestinian people. But the genocidal outrages in Gaza have given rise to the biggest worldwide protest movement in history, with many millions on the streets in countries worldwide, and billions behind them, in the Muslim world from the Maghreb to Indonesia, wider in East Asia, in Latin America, and in the imperialist countries of Western Europe and North America.

Huge Palestine Solidarity march to Israeli Embassy in London, February 2024

In some places these have led to workers’ solidarity actions, in other places, such as Yemen and now Iran, the mass solidarity of millions has had a military counterpart as armed actions have been taken against Israel by governments driven by solidarity with the Palestinians. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea has cost Israel, and Western companies and governments who trade with Israel, many billions of dollars in lost revenue.  The prison breakout on October 7th forced Israel to evacuate many of its civilians from a wide area near Gaza. So-far sporadic hostilities with Hizbullah forces in the North have also forced large-scale evacuation of the Northern strip of Israel, near the Lebanese border. Netanyahu gambled on the attack on the Damascus Iranian consulate to escalate the war in order to hide the failures of the IDF forces in Gaza, but the result of this action appears to have forced the withdrawal of most of the IDF forces from the Gaza strip, apart from a smaller contingent that splits the strip in two and prevents those driven into the South of Gaza by the earlier bombardment and mass slaughter returning to the North.

The attack on the Damascus Embassy caused a major problem for both US imperialism, and its Biden administration on the one hand, and Israel and the Netanyahu fragile war coalition on the other. The US ruling class is divided about how to handle Iran, and that division has been evident for several years. Obama’s Iran deal, which placed limitations on Iran’s development of nuclear power technology, supposedly to stop its development of nuclear weapons, in exchange for a lifting of long-standing US sanctions, is one manifestation of this. Netanyahu and the Israel lobby played a major role in agitating in US bourgeois politics against this deal: recall Netanyahu’s address attacking Obama’s deal to a joint session of Congress in 2015 where the conduct of US politicians was described by the eminent anti-Zionist US Jewish commentator Norman Finkelstein as like “demented Jack-in-the-Boxes”.  They gave Netanyahu something like 26 standing ovations!

Trump’s far-right election campaign in 2016 was bankrolled by Likud through the gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, who was Trump’s biggest funder. As Likud wanted, Trump tore up Obama’s Iran deal and implemented the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act. This had been pushed through by the Israel lobby more than 20 years earlier but kicked into the long grass by Clinton, Bush and Obama because it was irrational from the standpoint of US imperialism. He also formally recognised Israel’s annexation of Golan, the Jordan Valley, and East Jerusalem, which again previous US administrations had refrained from because they had no particular interest in doing so. The Trump administration thus gave a major boost to the power of the already-very-powerful Zionist lobby in the US. Though Trump was defeated by Biden’s Democrats in 2020, the cowardly and reactionary nature of the Democrats mean that they hardly dared challenge what Trump had done.

Though there has been a half-hearted attempt to revive Obama’s Iran deal, nothing else has changed in that regard, and Biden is still trying to shaft the Palestinians by completing Trump’s ‘Abraham Accords’ to supposedly ‘normalise’ Israeli relations with conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It is the massive exposure of the Gaza genocide and the mass rage this has generated in the whole Arab world, and wider developments such as the growth of BRICS, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined this year, which have made this problematic, not anything Biden has done to break with Trump’s far-right Zionism.

US Imperialism Wavers

However, the Gaza genocide and its massive exposure has caused massive political damage to the US, and the Biden administration is facing elections in the Autumn. As things stand, Biden is massively losing support from liberal and labor-inclined elements who traditionally support the Democrats, even though the way the deeply undemocratic US electoral system is designed makes it extremely difficult, in fact at present impossible, for a new political force to get on ballots to oppose both foul parties. Nevertheless, this makes the Democrats likely to lose to Trump, a mess of their own making, and that of the US ruling class, whose world imperialist hegemony is collapsing.

It is not clear whether the pullout of the bulk of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip is the result of US pressure on Israel, or of Israeli fears of facing Iran with most of its military bogged down in a quagmire. But it is clear that this diversionary escalation tactic in fact is bringing Israeli defeat in Gaza closer because Israel does not have the resources to carry on in Gaza and take on Iran, Hizbullah, etc. Palestinians have been quoted as saying that the night Israel had to deal with Iran’s retaliatory strikes was the first night since October 7th when they have not had to contend with massive Israeli air attacks on them. It has also been reported that the single night of Iranian retaliatory strike not only was the largest drone strike in history (so far), but also cost Israel over $1 billion dollars to deal with.

 In a statement issued on the day, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in welcoming the Iranian action, wrote that:

“…the legitimate Iranian response broke the prestige of the Zionist entity, revealing its fragility and inability to defend itself or restore its deterrence power. At the same time, it confirmed the ability of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resistance factions to deliver painful strikes to the Zionist entity, deepening its internal crisis due to its inability to achieve any of its goals in eliminating the resistance in the Gaza Strip or stopping the strikes directed at it by the resistance in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq.

“…the rush of the American administration and its partners in Britain, France, Germany, and some of their Arab tails in the region to use all their defensive weapons to try to protect the Zionist entity from the Iranian missiles and drones confirms the involvement of these parties in the Zionist crimes in the region, especially in Gaza. It also reveals that this Zionist entity has suffered a strategic defeat, has become humiliated and weak, and is unable to protect itself, now imploring its allies to take on this role.

“… the unprecedented Iranian strikes, the first of their kind in history against the Zionist entity, represent an important turning point in the battle of the Al-Aqsa Flood and in favour of the resistance factions. The repercussions of this strike will have pressing effects on the Zionist entity to stop its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip after the American administration and its allies realized that any escalation in the region would lead to a regional war where their bases and interests will not be safe, nor will the Zionist entity be able to defend itself after the collapse of its deterrence power and its humiliating defeat in front of the resistance in Gaza and other fronts.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/04/14/pflp-unprecedented-iranian-strikes-on-israel-signal-turning-point-in-al-aqsa-battle/

The Israeli gamble on trying to provoke a regional, or world war, to negate its defeat in Gaza, may well be forlorn. The US is losing its world hegemony, and that is clear in other conflicts apart from those in West Asia. Particularly in Ukraine, where their proxy Ukrainian client is facing imminent collapse, and the strains on NATO resulting from this are such that European imperialist powers, fearing a collapse in US commitment to NATO under a Trump presidency due to isolationism, are fantasising about intervening in Ukraine on a bilateral basis, effectively outside the NATO framework. The Zionist lobby have in the past congratulated themselves in getting the US to fight its wars for it, but at this point the US seems to be somewhat paralysed. It was prepared to use its technological resources to prevent Israel’s own Iron Dome defence system being overwhelmed by a combined assault from the Axis of Resistance, but hesitates to participate in an actual Israeli attack on Iran.

And it certainly does not appear keen on the wilder ambitions for world war and the ‘Masada Complex’ that may well be harboured by Netanyahu and his even more far-right cohorts, like Smotrich or Ben Gvir, to use nuclear weapons against its opponents in West Asia, with Iran a particularly hated potential target.  It is worth noting that Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who is now a particularly enlightened commentator on geopolitics and the Russia question, has surmised that even though Iran does not possess nuclear weapons (by religious conviction, according to Ayatollah Khamenei), it nevertheless is now able to shelter under the Russian/Chinese nuclear umbrella by virtue of its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, and equally importantly, its provision of drone technology to Russia for use in defending the Donbass.  This may well blunt the temptation for the US to act on Israel’s behalf against Iran even more. It is still possible that Israel’s nuclear arsenal may be used in such a conflict, but if so, they really could not expect impunity either.

There appears to have been a considerable exodus from Israel by parts of the Jewish population who have lost confidence in the stability and ability to prevail of Israel against the native people of the Levant. The October 7th action by Hamas was a huge defeat for Israel, not in strictly military terms, as they regained control of ‘their’ territory within a few days and forced the insurgents to flee back to the Gaza Strip. But it was a political defeat, as the division between Gaza and the adjacent areas of Israel is artificial and purely a product of ethnic cleaning and previous atrocities and massacres of the Arab civilian population. The vaunted stability of the Zionist colonisation was exposed as being built on sand. The only solution that the Zionists could envisage for that political problem was a genocidal one – the extermination of the ‘uppity’ population that had dared to defy the place allocated to it by the colonisers.

But that in turn has exposed the nature of Zionism to the whole world, and irrevocably destroyed its political reputation. The only justification that the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its camp followers were able to propagate for the increasingly visible crimes of their state was that Israel was in some way an atonement for the Nazi genocide of Jews. The element of racist injustice that Arabs, entirely outside the European continent where the genocide took place, should have to supposedly pay for the crimes of Europeans against the mainly Ashkenazi European Jewish population, was passed over in silence by the same Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its European and North American camp followers and cult worshippers, in the last three quarters of a century or so. But the decisive exposure of the genocidal nature of the Zionist project by the Gaza genocide witnessed by the world over the last 6th months is an irrevocable defeat. Never again, as the perpetrator of genocide itself, will it be able to trade on the bastardisastion of the Nazi genocide to excuse its crimes. That ship has sailed. The developing exodus of Jewish colonists from Israel could well, as Ritter has pointed out, point to a coming collapse of the settler entity as to make the democratic demand for a single polity based on full political equality, a democratic demand capable of being implemented in practice.

A major defeat for Zionism and Western imperialism, particularly US imperialism, is taking shape. However, the strategic goals of these forces have not changed, and the working class needs to be on its guard for further reckless and destructive actions from these forces, and above all to struggle for the full liberation of the Palestinian people from Zionist genocidal oppression.

Defeat Zionism. Defend Iran and the Axis of Resistance from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen. Destroy the Zionist State – for full equality and democratic rights for all in a workers Palestine. For permanent revolution across West Asia – for working class power!

US/British/French/EU imperialists – out of West Asia!