Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 22nd June. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here
Let us make very clear the position of the Consistent Democrats and the Liaison Committee of the Fourth International generally on this war, started by Israel with clear support and assistance from the Trump administration in the US, including by diplomatic duplicity and a pretence of involving Iran in ‘negotiations., and then openly joined by the US last night with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.
We utterly condemn the attack on Iran, an oppressed semi-colonial country, by these two imperialist states acting in concert, with the tacit and indeed material support of other imperialist states from West Europe such as Britain, France and Germany. We are for the defeat of Israel and its US quartermasters and lackeys, and the victory of Iran. We defend Iran’s military actions against Israel, we defend the richly deserved devastation of those cities in what is now called Israel, cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, which have now had their military and intelligence buildings, and infrastructure destroyed by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. We are also for Iran’s right to retaliate against those who attacked it. ALL of those who attacked it – not just Israel, but also the United States. We note that Iran has sympathising, militant groups all over the Middle East and beyond.
For a start, Lebanon with Hezbollah, and in Iraq, with well equipped Shia militia groups such as Kataib Hezbollah and others, who have already been firing drones and missiles at the Zionist state during Iran’s justified counterattack against Israel over the past week or so. Then there is Yemen – which earlier fought the United States to a standstill over their blockade of Israel in the Red Sea, and their attacks on Western, including US, shipping that was giving either economic or military support to Israel. The US was so devastated by Amanullah’s attacks, with their ultra-fast modern missiles, of Iranian and ultimately Russia hypersonic type, that they were compelled to break Trump’s solidarity with Israel, and make a separate agreement with the Amanullah movement/government in Yemen, basically that if the US left the Houthi alone, the Houthi would leave alone non-Israel-related US shipping travelling through the Mandab straights and through the Red Sea. Now, with the US joining in the attack on Iran, Amanullah have threatened to resume attacking Western shipping, from a position of strength, since Trump was forced to abandon attacks on Yemen earlier because of the US weakness particularly against the threat that Yemen could use its missile capacity to destroy Saudi and other Gulf oil production, which is vital to the US economy.
Even more startling in that regard is the threat from Iran to close the Straights of Hormuz, through which the products of over 50%, some say 70%, of the world’s oil production flows. The whole area bristles with US bases, not just in the Gulf itself, such as in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but also US installations left over from the occupation of Iraq, an earlier war of conquest that the US waged on Israel’s behalf, and also in Syria, sent in by Obama and Trump earlier in their crusade against Assad, also for his refusal to accept Israeli domination, in reality. It is now well known that the US used Al Qaeda and ISIS as dogs of war against Assad in a similar way that they used the Mujahedin and Taliban against the pro-Soviet, left nationalist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
It does appear that this attack on Iran in some ways follows the pattern of what Trump did with Yemen, in one important sense. Trump’s nickname is TACO – which stands for ‘Trump Always Cops Out’. It appears that Trump did this to try to please the Israel lobby that clearly put him in power but attempted at the same time to minimise the damage by informing the Iranian government through some kind of back-channel what was going to happen. Which gave them easily sufficient time to remove their nuclear facilities to other locations, so in effect the US action was a piece of theatre, performative, and has only caused relatively minor damage to some facilities that were already empty. It was a ‘nothing burger’ as Scott Ritter said.
It is very unlikely that these installations will be used again, as the main reason that the US knew about their precise location was because of spying by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) people, who gave detailed information to the US and Zionists. The IAEA, it has been clear since the Israeli intelligence treasure trove that Iran got hold of and published on the eve of the Israeli attack on 12 June, had also supplied Mossad with the identities and locations of prominent Iranian nuclear scientists, setting them up for assassination either by Mossad or by some of their pet terrorist proxies that operate in Iran. Such as the once-leftist Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which for decades has been a tool of Mossad, the CIA, and even Saddam’s Iraq when it was a Western ally, and which helped and still are helping the Israeli attack on Iran with smuggled lorryloads of short-range drones, and planting car bombs in the street to enhance the Israeli attack, and make it appear bigger than it actually was. So Iran’s counter-attack against all these forces is obviously legitimate, even under the concepts of ‘international law’ that the US under both Biden and Trump, have openly ditched.
Iran now has very good reason to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it adhered to for decades, while Israel developed an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons. The squealing about Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions by nuclear armed Israel was always a hoax, similar to the hoax about Iraq and ‘WMD’ that was used to justify invading Iraq in 2003. Iran has no nukes, mainly because of the pacific religious opposition to them from its Supreme Leader. Iran clearly needs nuclear weapons to render it invulnerable to such crimes, and it could ‘borrow’ some from several sources while under that umbrella it develops the means to make its own. Now it may do so.
The world has moved on. Iran is much stronger than Iraq was in 2003 – it is a far larger country, with 90 million population, a territory the size of Western Europe, and modern weaponry some of which is well in advance of that of Israel and the US. Iran is not alone or isolated – the clear statement from neighbouring nuclear-armed Pakistan that a nuclear attack on Iran by Israel would bring forth a Pakistan nuclear attack on Israel, was crucial in this war. Which is a good thing. At the beginning of the Israeli attack, Iran’s air-defences were hacked by a Zionist cyber-attack. But they were brought back online in a few hours with Russian, and maybe Pakistani assistance. It does appear that Iran is getting discreet economic and military assistance, in terms of supplies, from both Russia and China. Which is what you would expect considering Iran’s crucial role in BRICS.
So, Iran is winning the missile and drone war, increasingly using its more modern hypersonic missiles in the latest counter-attack attacks, which Israel cannot defeat. Its Iron Dome has effectively collapsed. And the civilian population of Israel is also suffering from these Iranian attacks. Parts of Tel Aviv and Haifa now bear some superficial resemblance to what Israel has done to Gaza. Though it’s not remotely the same in terms of wanton death and any deliberate destruction of the population. Nevertheless, there should be no squeamishness about Iran’s right to strike back against Israel as a state. Any civilian deaths are simply collateral damage of Iran’s right to defend itself against an unprovoked attack on Iran by Israel.
Israel is not a normal state. Many of its towns and cities are built on the ruins of Arab towns and villages. 400 such Arab towns and villages were destroyed, obliterated, in the 1948 war. In many other places, Israeli citizens live in homes that were directly stolen from Palestinian Arabs, who sometimes even still have the keys to their former homes. Israeli civilians are not like ordinary citizens of any of the European imperialist countries, or even those countries such as the US, Canada and Australia who had their origins in colonial settler projects of centuries past. Israel is a settler state today. Its crimes are ongoing. And it is somewhat different to these previous settler states in that the population is a very narrow layer of Zionist Jews that have an ideology that they are supposedly re-founding an ancient state that existed thousands of years ago.
This whole ideology is a grotesque myth, but it has been deferred to for the whole period of Israel’s existence in the popular consciousness in the West, for two reasons. One is bourgeois class interest, the other is a guilt reaction over the genocide of the Jews in Europe under Hitler in the mid-20th century. The second is a temporary phase that is being overcome to a certain extent because of the obscenity and brutality of this live-streamed genocide. The idea that Jews are somehow morally superior and eternal victims has become discredited to a real extent by the obvious Hitler-like racism of the Zionists, such as the speaking of their victims as ‘human animals’, by the former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant immediately after the Hamas led breakout from the Gaza death camp on 7 October 2023. We heard biblical talk by Netanyahu of Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ – a biblical enemy who the Jews are supposedly commanded by their God to exterminate men, women, children and even kill animals belonging to this declared biblical enemy people of the ‘chosen’ Jews.
This genocidal agitation is clearly similar to the Nazis, and this understanding has seeped into popular consciousness including in the Western countries, with the vivid exposure of the population to a livestreamed genocide. It is the political basis for the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant by the ICC for crimes against Humanity. This happened because of pressure from below. And for the Genocide case against Israel in the ICJ, which still exists though has become a byword for sloth and complacency, and the failure to do anything or even confirm their own provisional conclusions from January 2024 that Israel was ‘plausibly’ committing a genocide. The ICJ’s call for Israel to take immediate measures to prevent a genocide was completely ignored, treated as a joke by Israel. The whole concept of international law, international justice, the Genocide Convention, all that, has been openly mocked and junked by all the major Western powers since the Hamas breakout on 7th October 2023.
What we really have to examine is why. What is decisive is not, as yet, the complete popular discredit of Israel and Zionism in the popular consciousness, including in the West. Massively in contradiction to that is the cult of Zionism among the ruling classes of the imperialist countries of the West. There is a material basis for the strong influence of Zionism in the Western countries. This was exemplified recently by the revelation that 10% of billionaires worldwide are of Jewish origin, courtesy of the finance source Forbes. This compared to a world population where only 0.2% is of Jewish origin. That is 50 times overrepresentation and massively enhances the political influence of Jewish bourgeois within the ruling class. Who in turn are overwhelmingly Zionist, since this is currently the hegemonic ideology among bourgeois Jews.
This is not some kind of moral attack on Jews as a population for being disproportionately rich. There are historic reasons for that, which derive from the social role of Jews as a trading class under European feudalism, the repository of commercial capital, a primitive, pre-capitalist people-class of merchant traders. This was analysed in its essentials by Abram Leon, whose work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation was seminal, building on earlier material by Karl Marx himself. It is simply a historical fact that when capitalism replaced feudalism, elements of this pre-capitalist trading class were particularly suited to fit into niche elements of the emerging bourgeois society, particularly those involving finance and some kinds of trade.
In an earlier period, the non-Jewish bourgeoisie was distrustful of this layer of their own class, in large measure because the oppression of Jews under late feudalism had also created a situation where radical Jews played a very prominent role in democratic movements at the time of the bourgeois revolutions, and then in the socialist and communist movements. The bulk of the bourgeoisie earlier mistrusted their Jewish brethren because of this radical association, and it provided the soil for genocidal anti-Jewish (antisemitic) agitation to achieve a temporary hegemony among the bourgeoise, culminating in the Nazi holocaust in the 1940s.
But the Jews Hitler murdered were mainly the leftist and socialist Jews, and this changed the balance of forces within the Jewish people – to the advantage of this outsized bourgeois layer. This was today’s Jewish-Zionist caste in embryo. The Zionist movement conquered hegemony among Jews partly because of the Nazi persecution, though it was always a genocidal project, aimed at taking land by force from the indigenous people of the Levant and Middle East to create an ethnic dystopia. Like the proto-Hitlerite anti-Semites, pioneer Zionists such as Herzl admired early imperialist monsters like Cecil Rhodes, the plunderer of Africa, and sought to emulate them.
After WWII, with the defeat, exposure and discredit of Nazi anti-Jewish racism, the Zionist state was born. And a complementary hegemony was established over time in bourgeois politics. In the 1970s, as capitalism faced a major political and economic crisis, neoliberalism was like manna from heaven for the imperialist bourgeoisie as a strategic way out of the crisis. Many of its most prominent ideologues, such as Friedman, Joseph, Sherman, even Kissinger were Jewish and supportive of Zionism. This is somewhat mythologised, as an earlier pioneer of neoliberalism, Hayek, was not Jewish, but he lived at the wrong time and was regarded as a crank. But the upshot of this was the growth of a kind of cult of Zionism and Jewishness among the bourgeoisie, as the saviours of their system. The inverse of the earlier cult of antisemitism that drove bourgeois support for Hitler.
And the growth of this newer cult gave a massive boost to the power of that already outsize Jewish section of the bourgeoisie, and created the situation we live under today, where Zionism has ironically become a threat to the lives and liberties of ordinary people across the globe, in a similar manner as Nazism once was. So today, the Jewish-Zionist caste can order Donald Trump to attack Iran, and it can instruct Kier Stamer, another of its devotees, to attempt to proscribe Palestine Action. This is the nature of the bourgeois politics we face today. To fight capitalism, not just abstractly, but concretely, we must expose and defeat this odd Zionist excrescence, to open a real way politically to the abolition of capitalism itself.
