From Racism and Anti-Communism to Global Dominance: On the Use of ICE’s Foreign Policy Provision

By Brian Rome

Republished from Liberation School.

A foreign national spoke out against a country he accused of killing his family. After fleeing that country to escape persecution, the U.S. government arrested him and tried to deport him. The U.S. government was protective of its relationship with the foreign country he criticized and wanted to silence him through deportation.

It used a little-known provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that says the Secretary of State can claim their presence could have adverse consequences for foreign policy. A judge called his case “Kafkaesque,” meaning nightmarish, bizarre, and illogical, but the government was allowed to proceed with his deportation. The story is familiar but not new: it’s what happened to Mario Ruiz Massieu, whom the U.S. government tried to deport in 1993.

This is also similar to the story of Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE detained on March 8, 2025, under the pretext of the INA’s same foreign policy provision. The U.S. government targeted Khalil because of his principled advocacy for Palestinians and his role as a lead negotiator for Columbia students protesting their university’s investments in Israel. All people in the U.S., including non-citizen immigrants, have the right to free speech through the First Amendment. Khalil, however, is a legal permanent resident. The government is pursuing his unconstitutional deportation to drive fear into the heart of the movement for Palestine. Khalil’s story is not an anomaly but shows how U.S. immigration law is actually a weapon against the people both inside and outside the country.

The country’s first immigration laws were developed in 1790. These laws codified white supremacy and set hard limits on the types of people who could enter and enjoy full privileges of citizenship. In 1952 the original Immigration and Nationalities Act shifted the focus to preventing undesirables who held communist and pro-worker beliefs. The foreign policy provision was enacted in 1990 as an extreme show of force given to the state to target and isolate individuals.

From white supremacy to anti-communism to global dominance, each successive period subsumes what came before, rooted in the interests of the capitalist ruling class: preserving and expanding capital’s dominance over working people and oppressed nations in the U.S. and abroad.

To the roots: White supremacy and the class function of immigration law

Immigration law serves two complementary functions: external exclusion and internal discipline.

Exclusion operates through borders and legal barriers to entry. The government uses race, nationality, and economic class as gatekeeping criteria for particular working-class populations deemed as threats. Pro-communist immigrants, whether from Cuba, China, or Italy, are not allowed to become citizens. Banning entire peoples means that the government can entrench racial demographics and prevent the development of solidarity. If the only Venezuelans one meets are anti-socialist, it is hard to perceive the mass support of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Discipline, on the other hand, works against people who are here. Immigrants fear deportation. To avoid that, they may accept lower wages and keep quiet about violations of their rights as workers. Even when immigrants have legal status, their status is often tethered to their employer or their school. This effectively gives their boss or university the power to deport them. For non-immigrants, employers use the threat of replacement by immigrant workers to accept less and pit workers against each other.

The first such law, the 1790 Naturalization Act, set up an explicit class and racial barrier for citizenship. Only free white persons could become citizens. Free white persons excluded Indigenous peoples, slaves, indentured servants, and anyone not European or their descendants.

Less than 10 years later, Congress enacted its first deportation law, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. This was the first legal connection drawn between U.S. foreign policy and immigration. The U.S. at the time was at war with Revolutionary France. Under this law, the President could arrest and deport French revolutionaries and others deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The law is still in force today and has been invoked by President Trump to deport Venezuelan immigrants.

The 19th century was marked by European and American colonization and attacks on China in what would be known in China as the Century of Humiliation. China, the country that invented silk, tea, paper, and gunpowder, had been a trading partner with Europe for nearly 300 years. The European market was in high demand for Chinese goods but had little to offer in return. They were forced to pay the Chinese in precious metals, running up a trade deficit. Over time the British began importing opium–the base ingredient of heroin–and began addicting the population.

When the Chinese imperial government attempted to ban opium sales, the colonial powers found their solution: the Opium Wars [1]. They pried open China’s internal markets and flooded the country with opium, overruling China’s attempts to ban opium sales [2]. Ten percent of China’s population became addicted to opium. China was subjugated to Western capital. Many Chinese workers were forced into super-exploitative overseas labor as a result.

Many of these workers ended up in the U.S., where slavery had ended and the construction of the transcontinental railroad demanded massive amounts of cheap labor. Nine in 10 workers on the strategic infrastructure were Chinese [3]. Capitalists not only ruthlessly exploited Chinese workers (many died of overwork before the end of their labor contracts) but also stoked racial prejudices and played off white workers against Chinese workers. When white workers went on strike, capitalists hired Chinese workers as underpaid replacements. Some white workers–aspiring to be capitalists or not seeing themselves as members of the international working class–lashed out against Chinese workers and blamed them for being paid less and working more. In the 1870s, white workers violently expelled and even lynched Chinese workers in their communities [4].

In the wake of this racist hatred the government enacted the Chinese Exclusion in 1882, codifying the “Yellow Peril” myth–the idea that the immigration of Chinese workers constituted an invasion that threatened white society and its values [5]. Building on decades of anti-Chinese laws at the state and local level, the law banned (though did not prevent) the immigration of Chinese workers and made them ineligible to become U.S. citizens.

It remained in force until 1943, when China and the U.S. were both fighting Japan in World War II. Through the law, U.S. capitalists cemented the divide between Chinese workers and white workers, to the detriment of all workers. Expressly based on their race, Chinese workers were banned from legally immigrating to the U.S. and would be subject to deportation if they came anyway. Chinese workers in the U.S. were made permanent non-citizens. The fundamental purpose of this immigration law was not to protect “American” labor but to prevent unity with Chinese workers and cement racial hierarchies.

20th century immigration law: Crushing dissent

By the 1920s, much had changed in the world. Revolution had swept over Russia and for the first time peasants and poor working people ran their own government. Fearing this radical shift, the U.S. unleashed the Palmer Raids—violent mass arrests, beatings, and deportations targeting communists, anarchists, and labor activists. The top priority of the U.S. was to prevent the spread of communist ideas and communists themselves.

The 1924 Immigration Act was written to do just that. Designed by open eugenicists, the law racialized Eastern and Southern Europeans, imposed highly restrictive quotas on their immigration, and all but banned the immigration of Asians. The quotas were pegged to U.S. demographics in 1890–roughly coinciding with the closure of the frontier in the western U.S.–attempting to entrench the dominant position of white people of Northern European descent.

The law racialized Eastern Europeans, who previously were viewed as their own separate nationalities. The U.S. ruling class responded to the Russian revolution through antisemitic and anticommunist tropes like Judeo-Bolshevism. Most Jewish working people at that time were communist. The law’s racialization of Eastern Europeans built on the reaction to the world’s first successful socialist revolution, including antisemitic tropes like “Judeo-Bolshevism” that conflated Jews and Communists, and mass arrests and deportations of suspected socialists [6]. In essence, the law defined who should be considered “American” on racial terms. President Coolidge’s signing statement for the law was that “America must remain American,” and the U.S. State Department describes the law’s “most basic purpose” as “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity” [7].

Beyond the external exclusionary aspect of the 1924 Immigration Act, it also increased internal repression: for the first time, it authorized deportation of any immigrant who had overstayed or entered without a visa, expanding the class of workers made especially vulnerable in a way that “American” workers were not.

After World War II, the U.S. updated explicit racial quotas with a new focus: ideological control. The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), modernized the U.S. immigration system while entrenching its racist and ideological foundations. Though it eliminated the outright ban on Asian immigration—a concession made during World War II to align with Asian allies—it maintained strict racial quotas designed to preserve the demographic dominance of whiteness (expanded to include non-Communist Italians, Poles, and Jews). Immigration restrictionists still hoped to achieve “the preservation of whiteness” through the system, reflecting the enduring legacy of the 1924 Immigration Act [8]. But the INA also introduced a new dimension of repression: ideological exclusion. In the context of anti-communist hysteria—fueled by the Soviet Union’s nuclear advancements, the Chinese Revolution and the Communists’ victory, the Korean War, and the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the law barred entry to anyone affiliated with communist or “subversive” organizations. This provision was not merely about keeping communism at bay abroad; it was a tool for policing thought domestically.

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The law’s ideological exclusions mirrored the McCarthy-era purges that targeted communists in government, universities, and Hollywood. Leaders of the Communist Party were prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act, while the INA ensured that foreign-born radicals—or even those merely suspected of socialist sympathies—could be denied entry or deported. This created a chilling effect, reinforcing the internal disciplinary function of immigration law: it discouraged dissent among immigrants already in the U.S., who feared deportation if they expressed views deemed threatening to the state. Even President Truman, despite his Cold War anti-communism, recognized the law’s blatant racism and vetoed it, only to be overridden by a Congress gripped by reactionary fervor.

The INA thus exemplified the dual role of U.S. immigration law: external exclusion (filtering entrants by race and ideology) and internal discipline (suppressing radical thought and labor organizing). Like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 Immigration Act before it, the law served capital’s interests—this time, by aligning immigration policy with the Cold War imperative of crushing socialist movements at home and abroad.

The 1990 amendment: Suppressing free speech

By 1990, the decline and imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapprochement between the U.S. and China had rendered overt anti-communism obsolete as a justification for repression. At the same time, the U.S. was close to achieving global unipolar dominance. It had weakened the Soviet Union, had overthrown left-leaning governments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and was preparing to jealously guard its status as the world’s sole superpower. The U.S. ruling class needed a new pretext for domestic discipline, and an amendment to the INA adding a foreign policy provision fit the bill. The amendment passed with bipartisan support and little debate, reflecting ruling class agreement on foreign policy. The provision allows deportation whenever the Secretary of State declares that a noncitizen’s presence may have adverse consequences on U.S. foreign policy—a term left deliberately vague. A mirror provision also prohibits the entry of any person the Secretary of State deems adverse to foreign policy. In practice, this means the Secretary of State has full discretion to say that anyone’s presence in the country could affect “foreign policy.”

Congress anticipated that the Secretary of State could use the foreign policy provision to punish speech protected by the First Amendment, which has long been understood to apply to citizens and legal residents alike [9]. On paper, the provision includes a “safe harbor” for protected speech, prohibiting deportation based on lawful beliefs or associations. In practice, this protection is meaningless. The Secretary of State can override it simply by declaring a “compelling foreign policy interest,” a standard so elastic it can be met with a rote recitation of the standard in a two-page letter, as in Mahmoud Khalil’s case. This creates a legal black hole: noncitizens can be deported for speech that is perfectly lawful, based on secret determinations they cannot challenge.

The foreign policy provision was further strengthened by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which stripped lower courts of the power to review most deportations. Instead, immigrants facing deportation must defend themselves before immigration judges, who are part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch, and cannot rule on the constitutionality of the laws they are tasked to enforce. The result is a system where the executive branch acts as prosecutor, judge, and executor of deportation—a system designed to evade accountability.

“Massieu v. Reno:” Foreign policy provision scrutinized

The first major test of the foreign policy provision came in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration sought to deport Mario Ruiz Massieu. Massieu was a former Mexican official who had charged Mexican government officials with responsibility for the assassination of his brother and covering up the investigation. He faced retaliatory criminal charges and death threats in Mexico, so he fled the country and legally entered the U.S. where his family had a home. He was quickly detained by immigration officials. Mexico tried to extradite him but failed in U.S. courts on four separate attempts due to lack of evidence The U.S., close to the right-wing Mexican government at the time, instead invoked the new foreign policy provision and started deportation proceedings.

Massieu fought back and in 1996, in a bizarre irony of history, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, the sister of Donald Trump, delivered a rare but fleeting victory for civil liberties. She ruled the foreign policy provision unconstitutional on three grounds:

1. Its vagueness made it impossible for anyone to know when the Secretary of State could invoke it;

2. It denied targets due process–a meaningful opportunity to challenge the Secretary of State’s determination of adversity to foreign policy; and

3. it improperly delegated legislative power to the executive branch because it provided no standards for courts to assess the Secretary of State’s determination.

Her opinion exposed the provision as a tool of arbitrary repression: it gave the Secretary of State “unfettered and unreviewable discretion to deport any alien lawfully within the United States…because that person’s mere presence here would impact in some unexplained way on the foreign policy interests of the United States,” while “no one outside the Department of State and, perhaps, the President ever knows what our nation’s frequently covert foreign policy is at any given time.”

This victory was short-lived. On appeal, a Third Circuit panel including future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito reversed the decision on a technicality. The Third Circuit ruled that Massieu had to first exhaust his arguments in immigration courts before appealing back to the Third Circuit, which only then could decide the constitutionality of the foreign policy provision. The decision forced Massieu into a dead end. Immigration judges lack the power to decide whether a law is unconstitutional. Back in immigration court, an immigration judge rubber-stamped the Secretary of State’s determination that Massieu’s presence posed adverse consequences to U.S. foreign policy and ordered him deported to Mexico, despite death threats he had received there. After a years of protracted litigation, he died under house arrest in New Jersey in 1999.

The prosecution of Mahmoud Khalil: Imperialism on the domestic front

In March 2025, ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University and prominent critic of Israel’s ongoing–and U.S.-supported–genocide of Palestinians, under the same foreign policy provision. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, had committed no crime—his only offense was organizing protests against genocide [10]. The case against Khalil reflects the internal function of the foreign policy provision–and U.S. immigration law in general– as a repressive tool of the ruling class to defend imperialism.

ICE arrested Khalil in New York, moved him to New Jersey, and moved him again to an immigrant jail in Louisiana, where the government chose to prosecute his deportation [11]. While in New Jersey, Khalil filed a habeas corpus case to challenge his detention in federal district court, arguing that his detention violated his rights to free speech and due process under the First and Fifth Amendments. After Khalil had endured 104 days of detention, the federal district court judge granted his request for release on bail. Still, the government is withholding Khalil’s passport, and both of his cases are proceeding in parallel.

The government’s justifications and evidence for prosecuting Khalil are even weaker than those it invoked against Massieu. No foreign country has requested Khalil’s extradition or has accused him of any crimes. The government is relying on fake tabloids and Zionist doxxing groups like Betar [12], who identified Khalil on January 29 as a target for deportation [13], claimed credit for his arrest, and said it has “already submitted names of hundreds of terror supporters to the Trump administration” [14]. The only connection to U.S. foreign policy is the targets of Khalil’s critical speech: Zionism and U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. U.S. foreign policy falsely brands people resisting imperialism, Zionism, and genocide as antisemitic and terrorists.

The initial charging document the government issued against Khalil contained only a naked assertion that Khalil’s “presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” [15]. When the immigration judge required the government to submit all evidence that Khalil could be deported, the government submitted only an undated, two-page letter asserting that the foreign policy interest in Khalil’s deportation is “compelling,” along with backwards and unfounded accusations of antisemitism [16]. The letter recognizes that the foreign policy provision’s safe harbor applies, as it tacitly acknowledges that the case against Khalil is based on his “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful.” Based on the letter alone, the immigration judge ruled that she had no room to question the Secretary of State’s determination and ordered the deportation of Khalil.

Khalil is likely appealing the immigration judge’s ruling to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which will almost certainly affirm the ruling. After that, Khalil can appeal to the Fifth Circuit–known as the most conservative federal appellate court–and the constitutional infirmities of the foreign policy provision can be considered in an appellate court for the first time. Though the government cannot legally deport Khalil until his case is resolved, the government has recently shown a brazen disregard of court orders on deportations [17].

At the same time, Khalil is pursuing his habeas corpus claims in federal district court in New Jersey–the same court that decided Massieu v. Reno and whose rulings are appealable to the Third Circuit. The district court rejected the government’s arguments that Khalil’s case belongs in immigration court alone, in large part because Khalil’s constitutional claims cannot be considered in immigration court [18]. The Third Circuit may need to reconsider the application of the exhaustion requirement it previously articulated in Massieu, given the abundant clarity that it is futile to challenge the constitutionality of the foreign policy provision and the Secretary of State’s determinations in immigration court.

If Khalil were to prevail and win a decision that the foreign policy provision is unconstitutional, the government’s efforts to deport immigrants whose speech it does not like will become more difficult as courts impede deportations under the provision. But even failed deportation cases can serve as repressive weapons–to a large extent, the process is the punishment. It would be cold comfort for detained immigrants to know that after years of litigation, they will not be deported. The only way to deny imperialism that repressive victory is for anti-imperialists–immigrants and non-immigrants alike–to rise up and speak out.

Khalil’s case is not an anomaly. The Trump administration has already used the foreign policy provision against other outspoken students, like Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University and Yunseo Chung from Columbia University. While some have been released, many others have not. The threat is not limited to immigrants or legal residents; the government has reportedly considered deporting U.S. citizens to prison camps in El Salvador [19]. The escalation is a deliberate attempt to silence dissent. Already, the government’s use of the foreign policy provision against Khalil and others is blowing back, as thousands have taken to the streets in protest [20]. For every voice the government silences or removes, thousands must emerge in resistance.

The limits of the law and the necessity of resistance

The foreign policy provision is not an aberration but the latest iteration of a bipartisan system designed to serve empire and capital. From the beginnings of U.S. immigration law, the powers to exclude and deport have served to maintain racial hierarchy, advance the exploitation of labor, protect capital, and punish dissent. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to today’s deportations, immigration law has always been a weapon of class war—one that divides workers, shields capital, and silences critics of U.S. imperialism.

Legal challenges, while necessary, cannot defeat this system. The ruling class can count on courts to yield to their executive power, from the Third Circuit’s procedural dodging in Massieu to the Louisiana immigration judge’s rubber-stamping of Khalil’s deportation. Even when judges like Judge Barry rule against the government, the process alone is repressive and the government finds ways to sidestep adverse rulings.

Nor can mere awareness blunt weapons like the foreign policy provision. The only effective counter to this repression is mass resistance. Khalil’s detention has already sparked nationwide protests. Every attempt at deportation must be met with collective action. The struggle cannot be confined to courtrooms or narrowly defined targets of the day—it is inextricably linked to global movements of workers, students, and all people against U.S. imperialism at home and abroad.

As the labor slogan goes, an injury to one is an injury to all. The more the state wields immigration law as a weapon, the more the people must wield solidarity as a shield. Free Palestine and free us all.

References

[1] Ken Hammond,China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future(New York: 1804 Books, 2023), 7-8.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Lakshmi Gandhi, “A History of Indentured Labor Gives ‘Coolie’ Its Sting,”NPR, 25 November 2013. Availablehere.
[4] Katie Dowd, “140 years ago, San Francisco was set ablaze during the city’s deadliest race riots,”SFGATE, 23 July 2017, availablehere; “This Day in History: Oct. 24, 1871: Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre,”Zinn Education Project, availablehere.
[5] Sheila Xiao, “The Legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,”Liberation School, 6 May 2018. Availablehere.
[6] Jarrod Grammel, “The Palmer Raids and the First Red Scare: The Roots of Liberal Anticommunism in the United States,”Peace, Land, & Bread, 25 February 2021. Availablehere.
[7] “The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act),”U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. Availablehere.
[8] Andrew M. Baxter and Alex Nowrasteh, “A Brief History of U.S. Immigration Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present Day,”CATO Institute, 3 August 2021. Availablehere.
[9]See Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953);Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945).
[10] Khalil’s activity can be seen inThe Encampments, a documentary film released a few weeks after he was detained. Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, directors, The Encampments, Watermelon Pictures, 2025.
[11] Devorah Levy-Pearlman, “Fight to Free Mahmoud Khalil exposes the black hole of Louisiana’s ICE jails,”Liberation News, 3 April 2025. Availablehere.
[12] Chloe Atkins, “Government’s Case against Mahmoud Khalil is Reliant on Tabloid Accounts, Review of Evidence Shows,”NBC News, 15 April 2025. Availablehere.
[13] Will Oremus, “Meet the Militant Jewish Group backing Trump’s Deportation Push,”The Spokesman-Review, 29 March 2025. Availablehere.
[14] Joshua Mitts and David Pozen, “In Defense of our Shared Values,”Columbia Daily Spectator, 13 February 2025. Availablehere.
[15] “Notice to Appear,”U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 9 March 2025. Availablehere.
[16] “Submission of Documents,”U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 9 April 2025. Availablehere.
[17] Teresa Paez, “ICE Deports Legally Protected Maryland Father to El Salvador’s ‘Mega Prison’,”Liberation News, 8 April 2025, availablehere; Nicholas Riccardi and Regina Garcia Cano, “Trump Administration Deports Hundreds of Immigrants even as Judge Orders their Removals be Stopped,”Associated Press, 17 March 2025, availablehere.
[18]Khalil v. Joyce, Opinion, No. 25-cv-01963 (D.N.J. April 29, 2025). Availablehere.
[19] Chris Walker, “White House Press Sec Says Trump’s Seriously Considering Deporting US Citizens,”Truthout, 9 April 2025. Availablehere.
[20] Brian Becker, “‘First They Came for the Palestinian’: Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil Sparks Nationwide Movement,”BreakThrough News, 12 March 2025. Availablehere.

Palestine and the Commons: Or, Marx and the Musha’a

[Pictured: A Palestinian child runs through Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem, West Bank, where violence has been escalating this year. | Palestine 2024 © Oday Alshobaki/MSF]

By Peter Linebaugh

Republished from Journal of World-Systems Research

In 1958 the assistant headmaster did the Bible reading at the morning assembly of the Karachi Grammar School (Pakistan), founded in 1848 by the Church of England. The reading from Acts 17:23 concerned St. Paul’s declaration upon seeing the Athenian monument to an unknown God. “What you worship but do not know—this is what I now proclaim,” at which point I, 17 years old at the time, shouted the answer for all to hear: “Communism.”

As a child of both British and American empires I had come to this rebellious conclusion two years earlier at the Frankfurt Army High School. Based on study of The Communist Manifesto which I conducted in the library of the Officers Club at the I.G. Farben building, I was able to answer this ancient question posed in the Athenian agora by a man from Palestine.

I approach the wars in Palestine neither as an Arabic nor a Hebrew scholar or even as one knowledgeable to other forms of life in the region—olive, almond, fig, citrus fruits, sheep, cotton, or the grains like wheat. I come as a student, with a life-long admiration for the radical, abolitionist, and antinomian traditions: Jesus and the prophets, Karl Marx, Gerard Winstanley, Thomas Spence, Olaudah Equiano, the IWW, Frederick Douglass, Shunryu Suzuki, Elizabeth Poole, Ann Setter, Ivan Illich, Malcolm X, William Blake, Silvia Federici, E.P. Thompson, Robin Kelley, Manuel Yang, Michaela Brennan, Midnight Notes, Counterpunch, and Retort; and then I became an historian of all the above with particular interest in the commons. As Marcus Rediker and I said in the introduction to the Arabic translation of our Many-Headed Hydra, Herodotus, “the grandfather of history,” explained that Palestine lay between Phoenicia and Egypt.

Besides going to Athens, a home of philosophy (philia = love, Sophia = goddess of wisdom), Paul went to gatherings where they had “everything in common” (Acts 4:32). Jubilee was another Biblical thing I could cotton on to because I love its principles of land back, freedom now, no work, debt forgiveness, and rest for revered mother Earth. It all seems to me a beautiful combination of revolution and relaxation. Paul became a follower of Jesus who was thrown out of his hometown and almost killed for proclaiming jubilee right now. He called for rest and forgiveness. The only economic basis of such a thing is the commons. The struggle in Palestine helps us see this.

I believe that the musha’a (community-owned agricultural lands), like similar practices anywhere else in the world, can help us realize a world based on just conditions of mutuality, name it as is your wont: true communism, the cooperative commonwealth, the commons. The renewed thinking of the commons was born of struggles against the new enclosures of the neoliberal era and inspired by the commoning practices of autonomist Zapatista communes in Chiapas and its defense of the ejido. The commons is now understood as a key conceptual breakthrough in orienting visions and pathways to postcapitalist futures. The commons also marks the radical escape from the paralyzing misfires and legacies of modernist state socialisms (Ray 2024, see especially Federici 2019).

I must write about the musha’a, a Palestinian form of land tenure, or the commons, which the Ottomans, the Brits, and the Israelis attempted to destroy. It includes collective ownership, cooperative labor, and periodic redistribution. These are principles also found in the earliest promulgation of debt cancellation, freedom from servitude, and restoration of land tenures. In addition to jubilee, it was espoused by Enmetena, a ruler of Lagash, around 2400 BC and evolved into general proclamations of amnesty (Hudson 1993). The musha’a was a defensive institution against the fear of taxation and military recruitment by the Ottoman authorities.

Palestine’s planetary significance is threefold: first, there is its geography at the conjunction of three continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the waters among them. Second, there are the extractions from the soil of Palestine, as well as from under it (grains, minerals, oil, and gas). And third, there is Palestine’s significance concerning Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Three big religions, three big continents, and original economies of cultivating the earth, mining the earth, and drilling the earth, making modes of production from the “fertile crescent” to the petroleum present with its terrible planetary perturbations. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine has geographic breadth and historical depth, which explains why it is considered the “soul of the souls of all our struggles.” The whole world has awakened to it.

To introduce the subject further, though at the risk of passing from the contemporary sublime to the ridiculous antique, let us attend to a paper delivered on January 20, 1890, at the Victorian Institute in London by James Neil, M.A. He explains how in southern Palestine the arable soil was apportioned by lot (Quarterly Statement Palestine Exploration Fund 1891). He said,

the persons proposing to work the ground divide into groups, and the chief of each group draws a section of the land proportioned to the number of persons in his group. Each section is composed of lands of various fertility and qualities. These sections are again subdivided by measurement with an ox-goad, or a line called habaleh, the counterpart of the measuring line [as noted in Biblical] Scripture. The farmers, in such regions as possess this custom, prefer this method of communistic division to holding in fee simple.

“Fee simple” is feudal locution, an English legal term for private property: you can use or abuse it, you can bequeath it, you can alienate it, you can sell it, and above all you can exclude others (see Hyde 2010). Roman law refers to fructus, abusus, and usus, or fruits, abuses, and uses. The idea of individual, exclusive land ownership is, according to the historian Andro Linklater (2013) in his book Owning the Earth, “the most destructive and creative force in written history.” The Palestine Exploration Fund was founded in 1865 and carried out surveys and ethnographies of Ottoman Palestine. It was an Anglican operation financing archeologists and clergymen. “We are about to apply the rules of science,” said the Archbishop of York in Westminster Abbey at its founding, “to an investigation into the facts concerning the Holy Land.”

The Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund for April 1891 includes this in its survey of land tenure and agriculture in Palestine:

in Southern Palestine, and in a few other districts, the land is held in common by all the inhabitants of a village, and apportioned at stated times to the individual cultivators according to their ability to cultivate, their standard being the number and power of the cattle used for ploughing. Such lands are known as, musha’a.

In 1865, in addition to the founding the Palestine Exploration Fund, evangelical Christians in England formed the Victoria Institute to defend “the great Truths revealed in Holy Scripture…against the opposition of science so called.” Its leaders were Christian Zionists. The commons and communism were easily linked in the mind of the Church of England. In contrast to jubilee and other sacred Bible texts the 38th of its 39 articles of religion simply states, “the riches and goods of Christians are not common as touching the right, title, and possession of the same.” Let us look at this more closely considering the musha’a and communism.

In addition to Bedouin practices of common pasturage, the musha’a as a village-based agriculture was another version of commons in land, and was collectively owned by the village, whose individual members owned shares (ahsahm) in its use rights. These included the right to sow, to plough, to cultivate, to harvest. The threshing barn, like the land, was held in common. Secondly, the musha’a allowed the redistribution and equalization of ahsahm to different family groups at one- to five-year intervals. These rights were heritable and were determined by the wants and needs of the cultivator.

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When James Reid spoke of “communistic division” in contrast to “fee simple” what did he mean? The specter of communism haunts not only Europe as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), but Palestine too, says James Reid, M.A. to the Victorian Institute. “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” To what sense were Marx and Engels referring? They mean the employment of property as the means of exploiting others; capital, in other words. Marx elaborated on his understanding of communism years later when his Critique of the Gotha Program was published the very same year, 1891, that James Reid read his paper to the Victorian scholars of empire. Here he repeated the common definition among revolutionaries of 1848 and whose sense originated earlier with Gracchus Babeuf during the French Revolution (Foster 2020: 113): “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” The principle applies to the musha’a in which capabilities and wants are collectively decided. Communism and commons begin to overlap.

The musha’a evolved over four hundred years under the Ottoman empire, which claimed to own the land as rule for tax purposes on miri land. It arose in the village, not the state, as a system of collective land tenure for cultivators who comprised the vast majority of the population. Efforts to install private property by Ottoman reform, or British mandate, or Zionist occupation met with determined, persistent resistance in “the land-equalizing musha’a village throughout Palestine.” “There was no need for land reform, which only proved destructive to the economy of the fellaheen. It nullified the advantages inherent in the system and, unexpectedly, facilitated the transfer of lands from Arabs to Jews.” (Nadan 2003)

Samuel Bergheim wrote an early description of musha’a for the Palestinian Exploration Fund. From a European banking family, Bergheim bought property in Palestine with title deeds accepted by the Ottomans (Tamari 2022).

When my brother and I bought the lands of a village some years since from its inhabitants, the Turkish authorities recognized us as the freeholders, and gave us title deeds, in accordance with a law on freehold passed by the late Sultan about twenty years ago. Not so, however, [for] the inhabitants of the village, for when we came to portion out the land in plots for cultivation, the villagers protested and refused to accept the new arrangement. They would only have the land in musha’a. (Tamari 2022: 9)

The Bergheim family bought land in 1872; in 1885 Peter Bergheim was murdered. Gezer was also the site of one of the earliest encounters between settler colonialism (the Bergheim estate) and peasant resistance to the imposition of the land privatization code of 1858, in which the communal (musha’a) system was undermined. The murder of Peter Bergheim—banker, settler, and amateur archaeologist—by Abu Shusha peasants highlighted the dynamic relationship between archaeology, early European agricultural settlement, and peasant dispossession of land.

Noura Alkhalili (2017) explains that the musha’a was “a once-prominent Levantine culture of common land.”[1] She describes a major way that the village musha’a, a largely agrarian commons, was transformed in an urban environment following the violence of mapping, titling, buying, and selling which cast people into cities and camps following their expropriation from the land. The transition was catastrophic: the fellaheen became refugees and the refugees became proletarians. The process was aided by the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995, which banked on neoliberalism’s private property and market relations, and on the neoliberal theory of “economic development.” In Palestine, unlike England, it was more than fences and hedges—it included the thirty-foot separation wall on the West Bank built between 2005 and 2008 after the second intifada. How has the diaspora of the fellaheen carried on these notions of reciprocity, obligation, and mutual aid, whose origins are found in the musha’a, and whose values lie with the family, within the heart of the community, and the breast of every person? How are such principles transferred from the country to the city? What do refugees carry in their heart besides the paltry few belongings in their cart or car? What practices nourish and carry the collective wisdom of survival and resistance? Food, dwelling, security, health care, and water are immediate needs.

Noura Alkhalili, who did her field work in 2013, writes “The fellaheen in Palestine did not need any borders to identity their plots; fig and olive trees were convenient landmarks for everyone in the community.” She also explains how both houses and trees could become private property. Trees were mnemonic too as reminders, survivors. About John Berger, the art critic with a Tolstoy- like love of peasants, it is said that “the medlars and mulberry trees of Ramallah reminded him of the time before the Nakbah when it was a town of leisure and ease.” “As long as grass grows,” is the indigenous saying from Turtle Island. Les Levidow explains that one Palestinian response to the systematic re-engineering of land and the expropriation of Arabs from it, has been the “unauthorized” planting of olive trees. The olive has been a primary cultigen of Palestine for at least eight thousand years.

For Alkhalili, “The fellaheen resistance from below, against the British project of enclosure and commodification of land, was ultimately about the protection of the commons.” She reports from the Shu’faat refugee camp of East Jerusalem and how Palestinian contractors built high rises on musha’a land preventing Israeli’s from using it to build the separation wall. She refers to “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” that is, the coming of street vendors and houseless folks. “Enclosures from below are what happen when propertyless subalterns encroach on commons.” They too take steps to privatize property: “a process of class formation has occurred, tied to the individual appropriation of musha’a land,” which raises the question, “Is this rather a form of submission to both prevailing capitalist and colonial systems?” She continues, “While in parts of the world we can witness indigenous and activist movements seeking to reclaim the commons from private ownership, the opposite is happening in Palestine.”

In 1895 Theodore Herzl, author of The Jewish State and founding father of Zionism, confided in his diary, “we must expropriate gently the private property assigned to us….” Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” as well as Herzl himself, compared the Zionist project to the expropriations of the English and American colonists. Eighty percent of Arab land has been taken since 1948. Among the methods used in this expropriation is digging deeper artesian wells for water. A third of Israeli water supply is pumped from the West Bank. The domestic, municipal, agricultural, and industrial hydrological system is controlled by an Israeli water company (Levidow 1990).

Noura Alkahalili bears close and scrupulous witness to the urban transformation of musha’a under conditions of hostile occupation. Gary Fields (2017), for his part, provides an historical mirror for our reflections. His study is in three parts: English enclosures, Indigenous American conquest, and Palestinian colonization. These are three “cases” of enclosure. English ideas and practices “migrate” to America; English enclosures are in the same “lineage” as Palestine’s. The re-mapping and boundary-making conforms to modernization and territorial ambitions of estate owners. “In each case, systems of landholding deriving from custom and imbued with collective rights of use and cooperative forms of management came under attack by modernizers.” In three parts Gary Fields analyzes enclosure in England from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. He describes the conquest and reservations of Indigenous people in North America, and finally he describes the Palestinian case or the settler colonialism of the Zionists. Capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism are the terms that are offered in an attempt to generalize from the “cases.” Maps, laws, and fences are the techniques of acquisition and possession. For England it was profit, for America it became race, and for Palestine it was religion. “These three case studies of dispossession offer distinct pathways to modernity,” he writes, and we might just as well say the three cases are three lanes on the same superhighway going in the same direction, namely “modernity,” or perdition.

Fields employs Edward Said’s term “imaginative geography” as a first step in colonization, from which maps and a landscape will be realized. Land rights are rights of exclusion, delimiting mine from thine, to use an old phrase. Under the Ottomans, cultivators of Palestine created “a unique system of communal tenure known as musha’a—gave villagers control over cropping practices and spread the risks of subsistence agriculture.”

With the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of World War One, the British were mandated to govern Palestine. The infamous Balfour declaration promised the banker Rothschild “a national home for the Jewish people.” Under the British mandate 70 percent of village lands were still held in musha’a tenure. English land policy was hostile to musha’a. Sir Ernest Dowson, engineer and surveyor, advocated enclosure and partition of common land. He completed the first cadastral survey of Palestine. In 1925 his “Preliminary Study of Land Tenure in Palestine” (Dowson 1931) was in full continuity with the classic advocates of the destruction of the English commons, namely, Arthur Young, John Sinclair, and William Blith. The British succeeded in surveying and entitling 25 percent of Palestine. This weakening of musha’a was a victory for the Zionist movement, as land could now be bought and sold. Even still, by 1947 Zionists had obtained by purchase less than 10 percent of arable Palestinian land—the village and aspects of musha’a still dominated. Ernest Dowson led the work of land registration. He led the cadasters, surveyors who made cadastres, or registers of extent, value, and ownership of property. Their work paved the way for Zionist colonization.

Then again, in the Peel Commission of 1937, the musha’a was identified as a disincentive in face of stubborn resistance. The Arabs regarded the musha’a “as a safeguard against alienation,” to quote the Commission. Perhaps it is this relation to the land in the face of the British Empire that gave to the fellaheen its world-famous character, expressed in the Arabic word sumud, or steadfast.

The struggle is for liberation not for a new state. “The British Mandate’s survey and cadastral and mapping project…sought to centralize power and decision-making away from the indigenous population.… [The] project’s largest obstacle: the musha’, a land-equalizing system managed directly by the peasants themselves” (Quiquivix 2013). “The musha’a was characterized by the periodic redistribution of agricultural plots among peasant cultivators who held claims to parts of the land in the form of shares.” “The continual practice of negotiating land redistribution placed emphasis on relationships, accountability, and affective ties among villagers.”

The fence, the hedge, the wall, the haw-haw, razor wire, barbed wire, brick and cinder block became the means and symbols of this vast enclosing. Such architecture joined law (criminalization of custom) and cartography (theodolite, chains) to destroy communities based on common lands. In England they called such lands “waste.” In America it was called “wilderness.” Or in the language of the Roman empire, Latin, which instead referred to terra nullius or vacuum domicilium. Children sought “vacant lots” for their play, sports, and games. In contrast to the vernacular whose outstanding genius was the poor poet and deep commoner, John Clare, beloved two centuries later in Palestine which is neither a “nothing land” or a “vacant domicile.” The olive, the fig, the apricot, the vine, the pomegranate, the walnut, almonds, oranges, and lemons were Palestine’s fruits. 70 percent of arable land at the time of the nakbah still was held as musha’a.

The musha’a village resembled the English village with its collective decision-making, resource allocation, fruits of open field agriculture, and basket of common rights. Land in England assumed many forms: meadows, woods, fens, heaths, fells, moors, marsh, uplands, as well as arable lands. Each had ecological features particular to it and therefore modes of customary appropriation that also were distinct. The world knows the process thanks to English literature. Robinson Crusoe (1719) is the classic text of individualism, enclosure, possession, and conquest. At the peak of revolutionary movement against oppressors and enclosers—those who sought to close the open fields in the name of profit and commerce (“improvement” they called it)—the radical English poet, William Blake, wrote that “to create a little flower is the labor of ages,” and then again that “improvement makes straight roads but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.” The English “right to roam” is related to the Palestinian “right to return.” Enclosure brings about odium because it amounts to dispossession, impoverishment, depopulation, forced migration, dearth, nostalgia, sadness, and trauma. The hedgerow materialized enclosure, so did the straight road.

Through struggle, the musha’a will be transformed. Vestiges of mutuality remain today, even in the city and its refugee camps following the violence of war, dispossession, and privatization of land. Violence always accompanies expropriation. Ernest Dowson (1931) himself compared it to the Parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth century. Lord Balfour in his diary compared the colonization of Palestine to the dispossession of the Sioux, or Lakota people, about which we may learn from Nick Estes and the Red Nation who have raised the world cry, “Land Back!”

Indigenous people of North America cultivated plants with three outcomes: 1.) corn became the mainstay among “the three sisters” (corn, beans, squash); 2.) women tended these crops; and 3.) the village became the basic unit of society. These were undermined by “A discourse of land improvement and property rights—supplemented with notions of savagery and racism—[which] settled upon the landscape…. Checkerboard grid of municipal, county boundaries within which indigenous people were enclosed in reservations. “The most striking…finding in Enclosure, is the enduring influence of ‘land improvement’ as the ideological inspiration for the reimagination of landscape and a driver of the process to enclose and take possession of land.” Maps, laws, and fences are the techniques of acquisition and possession. For England, land improvement meant profit. What did “improvement” mean?

Commoners in England, as with Native Americans, were cast as “savages.” As such they belonged to far-away places (India, America, Africa) in far-away times (B.C., neolithic, feudal). To Arthur Young, the theorist and first comprehensive chronicler of enclosure, commoners were “the Goths and Vandals of the open fields.” Linking commoners of the metropole with Indigenous people of the world in the stadial interpretation of human history and its four stages leading to “civilization” or “modernization;” and likewise linking commoners and Indigenous people against economic “progress,” “improvement,” or “development;” the buzz words of planners, politicians, and policy makers everywhere.

An older study spoke of “stages,” not “cases.” What is the difference? Fields (2017) does not write of work and the continental reorganization of labor, nor of money and the global investment to maximize surplus value. The bourgeoisie produced theories of historical change with economic determinism by describing human history in four or five “stages” of economic growth. William Roberton’s History of America, published in 1777, in the midst of the American War of Independence, developed the “stages” theory of the progress of “mankind” from savagery to civilization. Scotsmen such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith produced the sociological and economic theories for the stages—primitive communism, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce—or in other words, savagery, barbarism, feudalism, and capitalism. Fundamental in each was the technological relationship to the earth as well as class differentiation and patriarchy. Gathering herbs, hunting in the forest, cultivating the soil, subterranean mining, until quantity overcame quality in incessant demonic accumulation. It was a powerful but illusory theory propounding both determinism and inevitability. The dynamic of change from one stage or mode of production to another occurred as revolution.

In 1878, Vera Zasulich attempted to assassinate the mayor of St. Petersburg and served time in prison for it. Three years later in March 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated in St. Petersburg. A month earlier Vera Zasulich found herself with a “life and death question” to put to Karl Marx: Can the rural commune (the obshchina) develop in a collectivist and socialist direction, or is it destined by the laws of history to perish as an archaic form? Is it just a phase from the past or is it a seed of the future? Marx’s response was interesting. He wrote four drafts of a letter to her. In the end he sent her a relatively brief reply and no uncertainty in his conclusion: “The special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.” (Marx 1881) The previous four drafts provide us with an idea of his “special study.”

In his letter to Zasulich, Marx (1881) quoted from Capital, whose first volume she would go on to translate into Russian. He stated that “the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process.” Marx writes her about “all the historical twists and turns” or the “frightful vicissitudes” which characterize such transitions. To her he makes a powerful distinction between the “archaic commune” when communal residence was in a single house, as with the Haudenosaunee or “people of the long house,” when kinship and communal membership considerably overlapped, and production was collective unlike the agrarian commune where the open field was divided into individual strips. Labor and land were collective in the archaic commune, while a dualism prevailed in the agrarian commune, with some collective elements and some individualist elements. Marx warned Zasulich that “to save the Russian commune, there must be a Russian Revolution.” Marx’s view of history is not linear but rather spiral: the past is not dead, and in fact it is not even past. Hence, “the return of modern societies to a higher form of an ‘archaic’ type of collective ownership and production.” He thus links the commons to the commune.

For us too this is the quandary faced in Palestine. Again, events compel us to think of alternatives to privatization. Again, we ask what is communism? For a definition we go again to Karl Marx (1845) who wrote a few years earlier in The German Ideology, “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” He puts practice ahead of theory. He says this in a context which rendered the great mass of humanity propertyless, destitute, and wanting. And yet it existed “world-historically.” Years later, in The Critique of the Gotha Program, composed in 1875 and published in 1891, he insisted that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

Protestations against private property did not originate with Karl Marx. They are worldwide, and history is full of them. Here are three examples. In 1794, from England’s oldest settler colony, Ireland, William Drennan (1754–1820), founder of the United Irishmen and coiner of the jewel “the emerald isle,” wrote as part of his defense against sedition:

By attaching the oldest inheritance of the whole people to certain round spots of earth, gives a locality to liberty, inconsistent with its nature: turns legislators into land-measurers and land-measurers into legislators; extending lines of demarcation, on the one side of which privilege is heaped up, and on the other common right trodden down. (Deane et al. 1991: 323)

Or, at the time of colonization of Massachusetts the Indigenous sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag asked,

What is this you call property? It cannot be the Earth for the land is our Mother nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?

And we have George Jackson’s questions from inside the Amerikkkan system of mass incarceration: “Who has done the most dying? Most of the work? Most of the time in prison (on Max Row)? Who is the hindmost in every aspect of the social, political, and economic life?”

Idealists seeking reform often return to study life on the planet prior to the privatization of property or the dominion of money and market. Land is the ancient foundation of human society and the grounding of the entire biome.[2] Neither state nor nation; neither imperium (sovereignty, war) nor dominium (borders, property). Instead, omnia sunt communia.

The musha’a evolved with the miri agrarian policy of the Ottomans, which comprised 87–90 percent of agricultural land of the empire. By 1914, the end of the Ottoman empire, the musha’a amounted to 70 percent of total land. It constituted 55 percent of the cultivated land in 1922; 46 percent in 1930; 25 percent at end of Mandate. However, only a fifth of the total land of Palestine had been divided into demarcated units. In 1947, Jewish settlement amounted to 8 percent of land surface in Palestine—by 1947, only 20 percent of land was settled with title. By 2017, Zionist settlement and infrastructure covered 85 percent of the territory.

It was not just law that modern colonists took from the Roman empire of old. Soldierly virtues, honor, fortitude, suffering, wounds, loss of limbs, blindness—were extolled. A huge array of cunning military punishments were passed down. It was a patriarchal affair, teaching the young men and boys how to die, obedience to the state, rape upon Mother earth, and white supremacy with its albifying powers to effect discourse, iconography, and structures of knowledge. “Whiteness” was born in the chromatics of alchemy as “albification.” This is what the young Marx (1843) meant when he wrote, “To have its sins forgiven mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are.” The sin here is theft of land. To forgive this sin is to give it back. But as Caliban said,

This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me.

Was not Sycorax from the Levant? These are remnants of one European empire to another. Yes, true, but just as foundational are the women, whose labor gives life, the preserver of community, the keeper of the hearth; responsible for the reproduction of human.

When it was said by the Romans of the quasi-independent plebeians that the proletarians were good for nothing except having babies, they gave us the word “proletarian,” now understood around the world. It refers to women especially, to aunts and “aunties,” to nannas and grannies, to sisters, and to sisterhood. This is why in South Africa it is said “touch the woman, touch the rock.” Women make the human community—cooking, safety, care, and memory. In any world-system, whether it is called savagery, barbarism, feudalism, capitalism—whatever—you will find women responsible for its reproduction. This is now truer than ever. The extended family, or hamula, was the basis of the village community and the musha’a.

Gary Fields (2017) distinguishes imperium from dominium following a distinction made under Roman law, where imperium refers to the territorial extent of royal sovereignty and dominium refers to the right to possess land within the imperial boundaries. One sticks a flag into the ground, the other erects a fence. Both bring the fort, the border, and violence. Imperium and dominium may parallel the difference between discovery and settlement. What is omitted is the transition from one to the other and the means of making that transition: war, disease, rape, and rapine! Rule by the stick—husbands beating wives, parents beating children, masters beating journeymen, masters whipping slaves, officers flogging sailors, and so on. The former inhabitants whose “discovery” was so heralded by Christian missionaries are “absent,” killed, or if they survive, they become self-alienated and shadows of their former selves poisoned by alcohol, shamed, dishonored, raped, destined to die young.

Christian Zionism is as old as capitalism. It dates from the sixteenth century. In England it reached an important peak at the time of Oliver Cromwell, the great commander of the English bourgeois revolution. Cromwell’s secretary argued that the Jews should go to Palestine. At the same time, after hundreds of years of exclusion, Jews were permitted to return to England under Cromwell. Kinship and commerce linked the Sephardim Jews from Amsterdam to the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Cromwell asserted himself as an imperial sovereign ready to compete with the other imperial powers and none of these had as great a reach as the Dutch. Cromwell was a bourgeois commander who exerted his people by war. He reduced obstacles to the enclosure of land, invaded Ireland, defeated Spain, captured Jamaica. And he was a Zionist. This was Jihad, Protestant style done in the name of Jahweh.

When Oliver Cromwell chopped off the King’s head and inaugurated the capitalist state, he appointed Walter Blith as surveyor of confiscated royalist estates. Blith summed up his years of confiscation with a linguistic sleight of hand worthy of George Orwell’s double-think. In 1649 he published The English Improver, followed in 1652 by The English Improver Improved, which links confiscation, simple robbery, the privatization of the commons with human progress. Land theft becomes agricultural improvement! Therefore, to howl against such robbery is to waste your breath. To resist is to oppose the future. It is to steal your land for your own good. This sleight-of- hand has proved essential to capitalist development, the creed of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Gary Fields (2017) says, “Not only was the musha’a seen as an impediment to local agricultural development and Zionist acquisition but it represented a non- productive use of natural resources inconsistent with European notions of ‘improvement’ and ‘development.’”

As Marx (1852) pointed out, “Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions, and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution.”[3] A number of Cromwell’s close advisors came into contact with Dutch-based Jews and advocated Jewish resettlement in England (they had been banned from the country since the thirteenth century). Millenarian eschatology (the messiah and the Second Coming), imperialist commercial competition, the Atlantic slave trade, and the colonial settlement of Massachusetts Bay combined. Two Baptists petitioned in January 1649 for Jewish readmission: “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Israel’s sons and daughters on their ships to the land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for an everlasting inheritance.” Christian Zionism is inseparable from the imperial beast from the English Revolution to the present.

If, like Fields, we compare the three cases as three “acts” in a drama, the unifying plot is missing. The “cases” have an actual, historical relationship to one another: the enclosures in England led to war and the colonization of Ireland as well as to the creation of North American colonies, each of them a plundering search for new commodities and new means of expropriation and enslavement of labor. Inasmuch as the wealth generated by the eradication of North American indigenous landscapes (the railways, the great plains) led to an insatiable demand for petroleum, the thirst for resources lurks, too, beneath the ravenous appetites in the Middle East (the oil, the pipelines, Zionism). This was the bourgeois revolution (1649) whose effects are on a par with the French (1789) or Russian (1917) revolutions. One would not want to substitute “stage” for “case” to resolve the problem; instead, the issue of interpretation requires an understanding of enclosure that is a necessary feature of the expansion of the system of capitalist relations.

At a theoretical level, capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism are inter-connected; even though imperialism is inherent to capitalism, which obeys the fundamental law, the impulse of the whole system: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” writes Marx. National liberation is inherent to the resistance of colonialism, though it may accommodate easily, as Fanon explained, with capitalism.

This is how the proletariat is created. In those parts of Palestine dominated by tenancy to landlords “the peasant cultivators are a shiftless class…and almost to a man in debt,” according to the reporter to the 1891 Palestine Exploration Fund. This debt inevitably causes him to yield his claim to the land, and in so doing he “becomes a Sherîk-el-Hawa (Partner of the Wind).” One can imagine how a poet might interpret this Arabic figure of speech. Mother Earth has expelled her ancient cultivators, who now disperse through the world, like seeds, to join the various others in the atmospheric diaspora. And there are many winds to pay attention to: the harmata, which blows from the Sahara into west Africa; the El Ñino, which builds from the Pacific Ocean into hurricanes. The power of those partners of the wind will be reflected down the ages in Anglo cultural production, from the painted murals inside restaurants that remind customers of home, to such sublime expressions of wind as Shakespeare’s Tempest or Herman Melville’s Typhoon.

Proletarians can’t rub two coins together. They have no land, no village relations, no subsistence, no wage. This is why the partners of the wind are so important: as proletarians they will carry with them the musha’a, steadfast. Sumud. The rock. To stand confidently, relaxed, firmly—a word akin to “upright,” which also combines social virtue with the physical upright posture of the body. Like righteousness, it is associated with truth, valor, probity, and principle: what do you stand for? It is nothing less than the transition from expropriation to exploitation. “The starting point,” Marx calls it, of the capitalist mode of production. This tearing apart, this separation, this wrenching asunder, the “irreparable break,” or the “metabolic rift.” In that transition from expropriation to exploitation, there’s a pause. Ed Emory (1990: 28), after traveling with migrant workers on the Red Sea observed: “These are the people who wait—wait their turn, wait in line, wait in huddled groups, wait looking through the gaps in the dock gates, wait for some official to deign to notice their existence. Always waiting.” They are, he says, “the people of the earth.”

Returning to the present moment in Palestine, we must add to the formulation “X2” (exploitation and expropriation) a dark shadow to each of its parts: exploitation + extermination, expropriation + extraction. The genocide being perpetrated by the Zionists in Gaza is conjoined with the extraction of land and oil. X2 is brought to X3 by adding “excuses.” The devastation, genocide, poisoning, and plunder of the ruling class is fobbed off in a series of institutionalized excuses: economic development, modernization, social improvement, personal security, and religious salvation. Each of these excuses has its discourse, its militarization, academic setups, racism, and politics. Like all excuses, on their face they seem plausible, normal even; until their shadows emerge as they have in the Gaza war for all the world to see. The global system of empire, war, and slavery has only led to a planetary system of flood, fire, poison, and disease. With these multiple catastrophes we anticipate the despoilation of the earth systems.

Although the prophet Micah promised each of us a fig tree (Micah 4:4), let us forgo archaic prophecies and conclude on a healing note of etymology. Gaza was a textile center and gave its name to a most useful weaving: gauze, the loosely woven fabric of cotton, silk, or linen used as a wound-dressing thanks to its ability to absorb blood and to act as a barrier to its further loss.

We have gone past the point of no return. Nevertheless, we are at a turning point. David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021: 524) write, “we are living in what the Greeks called…Kairos—the right time—for a metamorphosis of the gods, i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.” These chroniclers of the first or earliest world-wide human social formations call this “the right time,” the time of transition to another social formation. Gendered, racialized, imperialist capitalism has ruined everything, almost. Who or what among us will bring about the required metamorphosis?

To answer this question, we need not return to the dawn of everything. The musha’a of Palestine may guide our transition from one disastrous world and outlook to another: to the commune and the commons. And their relationship? We recall Marx’s (1881) reply to Vera Zasulich: “It is a question no longer of a problem to be solved but simply of an enemy to be beaten.”

From the Author: Thanks to Andrej Grubačić who invited me to write this for The Journal of World Systems Research, and thanks to Jeff Clark, Joe Summers, May Seikaly, Michaela Brennan, and Silvia Federici for critical encouragement.

Notes

[1] As a geographic designation of the eastern Mediterranean, the term “Levant” derives from the French for “rising” of the sun, and it also once designated in western Europe a right of grazing cattle on common land day and night named “levant et couchant.”

[2] A Greek word of sharing or commons plus a Greek word for life gives us biocoenosis.

[3] The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

References

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Linklater, Andro. 2013. Owning the Earth. London: Bloomsbury. Marx, Karl. 1852. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

            . 1881. Correspondence with Vera Zasulich. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/dra)

Nadan, Amos. 2003. “Colonial Misunderstanding of an Efficient Peasant Institution: Land Settlement and Musha’a Tenure in Mandate Palestine, 1921–1947.” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 46 (3).

Palestine Exploration Fund. 1891. Quarterly Statement. London.

Quiquivix, Linda. 2013. “When the Carob Tree was the Border: On Autonomy and Palestinian Practices of Figuring it Out.” Capitalism Nature Socialism. 24 (3).

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Tamari, Salim. Autumn, 2022. “Archaeology, Historical Memory and Peasant Resistance: The Gezer Excavations at Abu Shusha.” Jerusalem Quarterly, 91.

The Empire’s Strategic Failure: How the US-Israeli Assault on Iran Accelerated Imperial Decline

[Pictured: Iran’s Abu Mahdi naval cruise missiles are displayed in a ceremony to mark their delivery to the navy and the Revolutionary Guard navy, in Iran, July 25, 2023 (Iranian Defense Ministry photo.]

By Taha Zeinali and Sara Larijani

Republished from Monthly Review.

The June 2025 US-Israeli military assault on Iran—featuring Israel’s Operation Rising Lion and the US Operation Midnight Hammer confronted by Iran’s defensive Operation True Promise 3—despite achieving short-term tactical victories, represents a profound strategic failure that has accelerated the US-led imperial decline and strengthened global anti-imperialist forces. Rather than cementing Western hegemony, this illegal act of aggression has exposed the terminal contradictions of a declining empire desperate to maintain unipolar control through increasingly aggressive military adventures.

The Unmasking of the ‘Rules-Based Order’

The weaponization of diplomacy as cover for military aggression represents a fundamental breach in the international order’s trust architecture. By launching the aggression after announcing the sixth round of US-Iran talks in Muscat—with full prior coordination between Trump and Netanyahu—the West transformed diplomatic engagement from a tool of conflict resolution into a tactical deception for pre-planned strikes. As one statement argues, “the timing and scale of this attack only underscores the fact that this was a long-planned orchestrated campaign of military aggression, diplomatic maneuver, intelligence warfare, sabotage, and media manipulation, executed with the full complicity and material support of the US and its vassals.” This calculated betrayal, mirroring the WMD fabrications that enabled Iraq’s destruction, has irrevocably shattered the credibility of Western diplomatic initiatives. The strategic use of negotiations as operational cover not only violates basic principles of good faith engagement but also establishes a precedent where any future Western diplomatic overture must be viewed as potential military subterfuge, fundamentally undermining the possibility of genuine dialogue between the West and nations of the global South.

Furthermore, the fraudulent nature of the Western “rules-based order” stands fully exposed in the diplomatic theater that followed the attacks. In a spectacle of Orwellian inversion, European powers rushed to blame the victim while exonerating the aggressor. France’s Foreign Ministry condemned “Iran’s ongoing nuclear program” and reaffirmed “Israel’s right to defend itself,” while the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary called on “all parties, especially Iran, to exercise restraint”—conspicuously omitting any criticism of Israel’s illegal strikes. Germany’s response proved most revealing: the foreign minister “strongly condemned the Iranian attack on Israeli territory” even before Iran’s initial retaliation, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz later declared, “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us…. I can only say, I have the greatest respect for the fact that the Israeli army had the courage to do this.”

This diplomatic reversal—where victims become perpetrators—exemplifies Edward Said’s concept of Orientalist logic in Western discourse: Muslims must always appear as irrational aggressors, even when defending themselves from unprovoked attacks. The United Nations Secretary-General’s weak call for “all sides to avoid escalation” without condemning the aggression and attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is striking, showing how international institutions serve as what Noam Chomsky calls “instruments of the powerful,” using false neutrality to legitimize imperial violence. Notably, in 1981, UN Security Council Resolution 487 “condemned the military attack by Israel on the Iraqi nuclear installation as a clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations” and demanded Israel “refrain from such acts or threats of aggression in the future.”

This blatant double standard crystallized a permanent rupture in Iranian consciousness. Western powers reflexively defending unprovoked aggression while condemning Iran’s defensive response shattered all illusions about their commitment to international law. This betrayal transcended diplomatic disappointment—it exposed Western values as mere rhetorical weapons serving imperial interests. The depth of this shift emerged in Mohsen Chavoshi’s song “Alaj,” released the day of the US bombings, with lyrics declaring, “People! The remedy is in the homeland. The world is mere lip service; this battle is shield against shield. Free souls of the world, settle the matter with the slave masters!”

Nuclear Proliferation: The Empire’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The weaponization of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s technical assessments represents a masterclass in imperial manipulation. The IAEA director’s June report became a strategic weapon for Israeli and Western aggression. One day after the IAEA’s politically motivated comprehensive report accusing “Iran of failing to meet obligations,” the United States and Israel launched their long-planned assault. In this regard, Grossi’s biased verification became stage-setting for military treachery, as Israel and the US used IAEA processes to justify pre-planned aggression, demonstrating how UN institutional and technical bodies become complicit when US-led imperialism weaponizes their “findings.”

Consequently, by allowing its reports to trigger violence instead of preventing it, the IAEA demonstrated that its assessments serve hegemonic interests rather than non-proliferation, which undermines its perceived neutrality in the global South. As nuclear proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis warned, the attacks “will send shockwaves throughout the world” as nations conclude that “without nuclear deterrence, no nation is safe from Western aggression.”

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The US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, while achieving short-term tactical gains, paradoxically accelerate the very proliferation they claim to prevent through three reinforcing mechanisms. First, by targeting peaceful facilities under IAEA monitoring, the attacks transform a transparent, internationally supervised program into an opaque one beyond Western control, as Iran moves operations underground and ceases cooperation with inspectors—creating the intelligence blind spot the attackers feared. When a peaceful program under international oversight is attacked by the US and Israeli regimes without any consequences for the aggressors, it creates powerful incentives to move facilities underground and disperse them, cease or limit cooperation with international monitors, and accelerate clandestine development. Notably, Iran’s parliament immediately ratified suspension of IAEA cooperation, while other nations watched and learned. Second, external aggression generates unprecedented domestic unity and popular demand for nuclear deterrence in Iran, transforming what was once a debated policy into a matter of national survival across all political factions. Third, military action against a nation complying with international agreements destroys any remaining diplomatic credibility, sending an unmistakable message that compliance does not guarantee security and makes maximum deterrence the only rational strategy. This creates a regional cascade effect where other nations, observing that NPT adherence and IAEA cooperation provide no protection from attack, conclude that nuclear weapons serve “not as a threat, but as a shield”—potentially doubling the number of nuclear-armed states within decades. Thus, strikes intended to prevent Iran’s nuclear weaponization may have “more or less guaranteed that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state in five to 10 years,” according to a former IAEA inspector—transforming prevention into acceleration through a self-fulfilling prophecy of proliferation.

Normalizing Catastrophe: The West’s Moral Numbness

The Western public’s complicity in normalizing attacks on nuclear facilities—acts explicitly prohibited under international law—represents a catastrophic moral failure that will inevitably boomerang against Western interests. This ethical numbness, which is already evident in the silence regarding Gaza’s genocide, has set precedents that fundamentally compromise global nuclear security. By legitimizing strikes on safeguarded nuclear infrastructure, Western states have created a playbook that any actor can invoke, transforming their own nuclear facilities into legitimate targets under the logic they themselves have normalized. The sophisticated drone and quadcopter assassination campaigns celebrated in Western media as technological triumphs have democratized precision strike capabilities in ways that fundamentally disadvantage established powers. The proliferation of small FPV quadcopters capable of penetrating urban areas and infrastructure for terrorist operations—tactics perfected through the Zionist regime’s operations deep within Iranian territory—provides asymmetric actors with cost-effective templates for targeting Western interests. These lethal autonomous systems, applauded when deployed against Iranian scientists, officials, and civilians, will inevitably be replicated by groups planning attacks on Western soil. The technology cannot be contained; once normalized as legitimate warfare, these methods become universally available tools that favor weaker actors against technologically superior adversaries.

This boomerang effect extends beyond tactics to fundamental security vulnerabilities. Western support for indiscriminate quadcopter attacks that kill civilians alongside intended targets has legitimized a form of warfare where the distinction between combatants and non-combatants dissolves. The precedent of attacking nuclear facilities—once considered the ultimate taboo—means Western nuclear infrastructure now operates under the constant threat of similar strikes, justified by the very logic Western states championed. The complicity of Western publics in endorsing these violations of international law has not merely eroded moral authority but created tangible security risks that will haunt their societies for generations.

Manufacturing Consent for Aggression

The systematic media campaign followed the propaganda model Herman and Chomsky documented decades ago. Western outlets consistently framed unprovoked Israeli strikes as “defensive” while Iran was actively negotiating; amplified false claims about imminent nuclear threats despite IAEA contradictions; minimized Iranian civilian casualties (over 600 dead) while emphasizing Israeli military targets; and transformed Iran’s restrained response into “escalation.”

This transparent operation, reminiscent of Iraq WMD deceptions, has accelerated the collapse of Western media credibility across the Global South, driving audiences toward alternative information sources. For the Iranian public, this media blitz definitively unmasked Western journalism’s claimed neutrality as manufactured consent in service of imperial narratives. The brazen distortion of reality—portraying clear aggression as self-defense while casting legitimate retaliation as terrorism—has altered how Iranians view Western information sources. This represents more than media skepticism; it has ignited the emergence of an epistemological break where populations reject not just Western conclusions, but the very frameworks through which the West interprets global events.

The Boomerang of Regime Change Strategy

Beyond targeting Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Israel and the US pursued regime change through targeted assassinations of military commanders and systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure. This strategy fatally misread both the Islamic Republic’s military resilience and Iranian society’s response to external aggression.

The assassination campaign aimed to neutralize IRGC’s retaliatory capabilities through shock and decapitation. Despite successfully martyring numerous top commanders, Iranian missiles struck Tel Aviv less than 24 hours with devastating impact—shattering Israeli and US expectations of a paralyzed command structure.

Israel then deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, particularly IRIB’s television studios, seeking to create chaos that would trigger popular uprising. This calculated terrorism altogether killed over 600 civilians but produced the opposite effect: unprecedented national unity transcending political divisions. The iconic image of an Iranian presenter continuing her broadcast as bombs fell became a symbol of defiance. Even government critics rallied to defend sovereignty against foreign aggression. As one Tehran professor noted: “They united us in ways our government never could.” The stark choice between opposing one’s government and defending one’s nation dissolved when faced with external assault. Ultimately, the regime-change opposition watched their hopes collapse as the Islamic Republic demonstrated unexpected resilience and Iranians rallied behind the military defenders despite the surprise terrorist assault.

Political Suicide of the Opposition

The opposition’s support for foreign military attacks ultimately proved to be politically fatal. Pro–regime change figures who backed the US-Israeli assault—explicitly or implicitly—found themselves utterly isolated from Iranian public opinion. Their alignment with forces bombing Iranian civilians was widely viewed as treason. Opposition figures who had cultivated international profiles through Western media and funding, Nobel prizes, and cultural awards saw decades of credibility vanish overnight. By calling for regime overthrow while foreign bombs fell on their countrymen, they committed what analysts termed “political suicide,” permanently destroying their viability as political alternatives.

Iran Transformed

The civilian casualties and infrastructure damage also intensified anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment across Iranian society, gaining renewed emotional resonance as direct responses to military aggression. This emotional shift strengthened pro-resistance elements within Iran while discrediting those who had advocated for diplomatic engagement with the West with the hope of normalization of relations.

The regime change strategy thus achieved the inverse of its intended effects: rather than weakening the Islamic Republic of Iran, it consolidated domestic support around resistance to foreign intervention, eliminated viable opposition alternatives, and provided the government with renewed legitimacy as defenders of national sovereignty against foreign aggression.

Despite tactical military losses, Iran emerged politically stronger with enhanced national cohesion. The attacks against a nation actively engaged in negotiations generated widespread domestic support for resistance, strengthening defense forces and the IRGC’s legitimacy as a defender of national sovereignty. Supreme Leader Khamenei’s warning that Iran “will not surrender” to foreign aggression resonated across Iranian society, while the systematic targeting of nuclear scientists and military commanders was perceived as an attack on Iranian civilization itself. The aggression vindicated decades of Iranian warnings about Western imperial intentions.

The Illusion of Air Supremacy

Israel and the United States’ achievement of temporary air superiority through terrorist attacks from within Iran failed to accomplish strategic objectives. As military historians note, translating tactical success into strategic success requires more than what air power can deliver. Despite over 1,000 Israeli sorties, Iran’s nuclear program suffered only temporary degradation. US intelligence assessments concluded the strikes “only set back” capabilities “by months.” Furthermore, the US intelligence apparatus is unable to confirm with certainty how successful the bombing of Fordow was and whether the stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strike.

This uncertain outcome validates the historical lesson no imperial power seems capable of learning: air power alone cannot achieve political objectives. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the delusion that technological superiority translates into political control has repeatedly proven false.

The Myth of Israel’s Impenetrable Air Defense

Iran’s unprecedented missile offensive during Operation True Promise III delivered a decisive strategic blow to Israeli deterrence by exposing critical vulnerabilities in its air defense architecture. Launching over 550 ballistic missiles alongside 1,000+ drones in coordinated waves, Iran demonstrated an ability to conduct saturation attacks that overwhelmed defensive systems despite high interception rates.

The US-Israeli war on Iran exposed the economic unsustainability of imperial military dominance. Israel expended interceptor missiles faster than production capacity, forcing reliance on increasingly expensive US munitions. Iran’s asymmetric response using relatively cheap drones and missiles demonstrated how “the cost-benefit curve is upside down” when “$10,000 one-way drones” threaten “$2 million missiles.” The economic arithmetic of imperial decline manifested starkly in the conflict’s cost dynamics. Israel expended interceptor missiles faster than production capacity, each $3 million Arrow interceptor defeating a $10,000 Iranian drone—what one analyst called an “upside-down cost curve” that guarantees bankruptcy through victory. This mirrors historical patterns of empires exhausting themselves through military overextension, from Rome to Britain.

Iran’s missile offensive revealed three critical realities: sophisticated tactics penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow systems, proving that even the most advanced and expensive air defense systems leave critical infrastructure exposed to residual strikes. Iran has weaponized cost asymmetry, as Iran’s inexpensive drones and missiles forced Israel to expend multimillion-dollar interceptors at unsustainable rates. Deterrence erosion occurred as Iran proved it could launch precision strikes from its territory directly at Israeli soil—shattering the myth of Israel’s invulnerability. Iran’s missile offensive shattered Israeli deterrence mythology by demonstrating that sophisticated tactics could penetrate even the most advanced air defense systems. The psychological impact—proving Israel vulnerable to direct attack from Iranian territory—fundamentally altered regional power calculations.

Catalyst of Multipolarity

While providing limited direct military support, China and Russia’s diplomatic solidarity signaled hardening geopolitical divisions. China’s condemnation of “violations of Iran’s sovereignty” and Russia’s denunciation of “absolutely unprovoked aggression” marked the consolidation of alternative power structures. Even traditional US allies called for restraint, revealing cracks in imperial architecture.

The war of aggression represents what critical analysts identify as the “desperate phase” of imperial decline, when dominant powers resort to increasingly reckless military adventures to maintain control. The inability to secure broad international support, domestic American opposition, and the ultimate necessity for hasty ceasefire negotiations revealed the limits of unipolar power projection.

The aggression definitively confirmed that the West seeks Iran’s destruction, not accommodation. No diplomatic engagement or restraint could shield Iran from US-led imperial violence. This brutal clarity accelerates Iran’s pivot toward comprehensive integration with China, Russia, and North Korea—forging an Eastern bloc united against US hegemony. Beyond economic ties, Iran now leans toward full-spectrum military coordination with these powers as an existential necessity, not a policy preference. The defense minister’s immediate post-ceasefire trip to China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) defense ministers’ meeting signaled this strategic realignment. The war catalyzed stark global polarization: the multipolar order emerges not through gradual transition but through hardening opposing camps—a dynamic Western firepower cannot reverse.

Iran as Vanguard of Global Resistance

Rather than isolating Iran, the attacks enhanced its credibility as the primary force resisting Western domination. The act of aggression validated Iran’s consistent argument that accommodation with imperial powers remains impossible, strengthening anti-imperialist factions throughout the region. Iran’s missile strikes resonated far beyond military calculations, igniting support by peoples across the world horrified by Western complicity in Gaza’s genocide. For millions watching international institutions fail to address the atrocities by the Zionist regime, Iran’s missiles represented the most powerful resistance to Zionist aggression in decades.

This moment shattered decades of Orientalist caricature that painted Iran as a “rogue” and “reactionary” state. Instead, Iran emerged as the most consequential and principled power in West Asia, embodying the aspirations of those who demand justice, dignity, and a genuine end to impunity. Iran’s defiance redefined regional possibilities and exposed the moral bankruptcy of states complicit in ongoing genocide.

Iran’s direct confrontation with both Israel and the US simultaneously—previously considered suicidal—demonstrated a confidence that resonated across the Global South. As one Arab commentator noted, “They did what our governments only dream of.”

Strategic Implications for Forces

The June 2025 aggression, like previous imperial adventures, has accelerated rather than arrested processes of imperial decline. By choosing military confrontation over diplomatic engagement, the US and Israel validated arguments that Western imperialism respects only strength. The attacks have proven nuclear deterrence remains the ultimate sovereignty guarantee; air supremacy cannot achieve political transformation; high-tech militarism has inherent limitations; and imperial violence represents weakness, not strength.

For anti-imperialist forces globally, Iranian resistance provides both tactical lessons and strategic inspiration. The failure of overwhelming military superiority to achieve political objectives demonstrates that sustained resistance remains possible. As historians observe, “Every empire believes itself eternal until the moment it falls.”

The US-Israeli aggression against Iran marks not the restoration of imperial authority but its terminal crisis—a violent spasm of declining empire that has strengthened rather than weakened global resistance to Western domination. In this light, the empire’s tactical victory becomes history’s verdict: a pyrrhic triumph accelerating the very multipolar transition it sought to prevent.

Ghassan Kanafani: A Legacy of Giving and Resistance

[Pictured: A Palestinian girl passes by a mural of Ghassan Kanafani in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank, May 12, 2018. (Credit: Anne Paq/Activestills)]

By Mohamad Kadan

"In truth, the only way out of this murky spiral is to believe that giving is acceptable, only for civilized humans... and that taking is undesirable... that living is about offering oneself, with no expectation of return... I am trying now to reach this belief in one way or another, or life becomes, without this belief, something absolutely unbearable..." [1]

— Ghassan Kanafani

I decided to write a text about Ghassan Kanafani to learn about one of his human characteristics: not just being a writer, an intellectual, a thinker, or a revolutionary. Recently, I have delved into the writings of several people who knew Kanafani, and they all agreed that he gave his life for Palestine through continuous giving, not only in the literary field but also by using his literature to provide us with the value of perseverance and endurance. The above quote is from Kanafani’s diary on January 4, 1960, written in haste, but as he describes it, it is as necessary as life. The question I pose in this text is: How does Kanafani want us to know him? What signs did he leave, from his comrades, newspapers, archives, letters, studies, stories, novels, and plays?

In 1952, Kanafani received approval to be appointed as a teacher at the UNRWA schools. His brother, Adnan Kanafani, tells us how Kanafani became a model teacher, spreading enthusiasm and overcoming oppression and defeat inside Palestinian camps. There, he met Mahmoud Falahah, an Arabic language teacher, who attended one of Kanafani’s classes due to his admiration for Kanafani’s exceptional ability to awaken the students’ potential [2].

Kanafani wrote a short story titled "A New Sun," published in the Lebanese literary magazine Al-Adab, the magazine most associated with Kanafani’s legacy. In it, he tells us in his extraordinary language about the decision to leave Damascus for Kuwait, through a letter to his friend Mustafa, who was studying in Sacramento: "The Kuwaiti Ministry of Education signed a contract with you last year, excluding me entirely. While I was going through a period of deep hardship, you occasionally sent me small sums, which you now want to be considered a debt, perhaps out of fear that I might feel diminished. Yet you knew very well my family’s circumstances: that my modest salary from the UNRWA schools was barely enough to support my elderly mother, my brother’s widow, and her four children." He then tells us about Israel's attack on Gaza, his follow-up on it, and whether it affected his daily routine, asking what he could do when they bombard "our Gaza" with fire and bombs. His decision to leave Damascus and teach refugee children made him regretful, directly affecting his writing and the question of giving—how, where, and why. He answered this in his short life by saying that we can give to Palestine from every position, region, and space. In late 1955, he traveled to Kuwait after accepting a job as a teacher in drawing and sports, where he felt an intense sense of loneliness and pain [3].

Kanafani did not flatter people "right and left." On the contrary, you might sometimes consider him self-absorbed, not caring about others' feelings and thoughts, as Fadl al-Naqeeb told us. Kanafani had many layers and was a flexible person. You had to wait and be patient to see him, observe him, and focus on his movements, writing, words, and conversations. Al-Naqeeb adds that he and his "Literature and Life" friends realized Kanafani’s value. Al-Naqeeb went on to study in the United States and received a copy of the story "The Cat" from his first collection, Death of Bed No. 12, which was published in 1957. He greatly admired it, and while exchanging letters, Kanafani told him that only a few had admired this story. As a result, Al-Naqeeb translated it and presented it in one of the English literature courses, where the professor allowed him to read it to the entire class. After the publication of Men in the Sun, Ghassan Kanafani asked al-Naqeeb to write a critical article about the novel. After publishing the masterpiece “Men in the Sun,” Kanafani asked al-Naqeeb to write a critical article about the story. Al-Naqeeb apologized, explaining that he could not fully grasp the essence of the novel, as the gap between reality and fiction was too narrow: “He told me how they had to move from their old home there, and the emotional sadness that accompanied this process, and how they found the letters F.K. engraved on the walls. His father’s name was Faiz Kanafani.” Al-Naqeeb felt that the story Kanafani wrote reflected his past, and that whatever he could write would not do it justice [4].

Kanafani’s wife, Anna Kanafani, also wrote about their first meeting in Beirut in 1961. She had said that she did not understand what had happened with the Palestinians and wanted to visit the camps. He yelled at her, "Do you think our people are animals in a zoo?" He told her that no one would take her there unless she understood the political background, and he explained the history of the Palestinian cause. Two weeks later, Kanafani told her, "Why don’t you stay longer?" She indeed stayed, worked at a kindergarten, was deeply influenced by his ideas, got to know his family, and they married. She recalls his ability to give even under the most challenging conditions, especially in 1967. His mother passed away a week before the June defeat in Damascus, and he was focused on standing strong beside his father and family. Upon returning to Beirut, she saw him for the first time breaking down in tears—was it because of the defeat, or for his mother? This was followed by the death of his friend, the novelist Samira Azzam from Acre, for whom he wrote a eulogy titled "The Promise," to inspire hope for his eternal city, Akka [5].

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Ghassan Kanafani gave a lot through his teaching career, literary work, criticism, political thought, and revolutionary activity. As we have seen, Kanafani’s fundamental role was in his relationship with his community, building and strengthening abilities, and providing opportunities. Mahmoud Darwish wrote in a eulogy titled "A Gazelle Foretelling an Earthquake": "My friend Ghassan! How many friends have I said goodbye to, but never bid farewell to a phase of my life, except in your final goodbye? The last thing I expected from nightmares was to announce your previous declaration about my existence ten years ago. I was born before that, but you announced my birth. I didn’t tell you: Thank you, I thought life was longer." Here, we see Kanafani’s generosity—he gave birth to resistance poets, directly contributing to creating a concept, practice, and framework for resistance art. Darwish and his companions, such as Samih al-Qasim, Hanna Abu Hanna, Rashid Hussein, Jamal Qawwar, and Hanna Ibrahim, poets from the occupied land in 1948, became part of the Arab intellectual and cultural scene after Kanafani’s writings. Their celebration was "stunningly embarrassing," as Darwish said about the neglect and denial before their birth announcement [6].

Generosity is a defining trait in Kanafani’s biography, and his ability to care for others matured through his relationship with his father, the lawyer and activist from the 1930s, whose legal work was connected to the oppressed and deprived. Anna quotes Kanafani as saying: "When I grow up, I want to be like my father, and I will fight to return to Palestine: my father's homeland, the land that he and Umm S’ad (أم سعد) told me so much about." "My father was a good man. He would buy me anything I wanted, and I still love him, even though he passed away." Kanafani’s concern with class struggle is related to his childhood, and its collapse before his eyes [7].

Kanfani: The Revolutionary

Kanfani's legacy is about his generosity in recruiting and attracting people to the revolution, as he was interested in the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Through poetry and culture, he also covered struggles, dispossession, and their organization. He did publish part of the memorandum of Arab citizens of Israel sent by the Al Ard movement, as Sabri Jiryis was their leader. I interviewed him, talking about his time under military rule, his struggles, and how he got involved with the Al-Ard movement. Later in 1970, he left and joined the PLO in Beirut through Fatah. Toward the end of the interview, I asked if he had ever met Kanafani. He said he did, and a few times, they spoke and had conversations.

He came to me with anger in his face and said, “Someone like you should be with us—the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” I told him, “My brother Ghassan, you’re thinking differently—big ideas, heavy theory, complex stuff. I’m a simple man. Fatah fits me better. It’s not left, not right—it sits in the middle, and that works for me.” I told him, “My comrade Ghassan, I can’t be part of the PFLP. I’m not in tune with the group. I can’t speak about the proletariat, class struggle, or internationalism. I respect Che Guevara and Castro, but I don’t think that model works for us here in Palestine.” Then I shared a story with him—about when I first arrived in Beirut. Naji Alloush, the Arab thinker, handed me his book and asked for my thoughts. Two days later, he returned and said, “Well, what do you think of discussions on the Palestinian Revolution?” I told him, “You made a grave mistake—like many Palestinian leftists—when you wrote that if there had been a Palestinian Lenin, none of this would have happened. That’s a flawed idea to open a book with. [8]

This story tells us about Kanfani's ambition and organization and how he always aims to recruit people for the organization and the revolution. Sabri Jiryis chose another path in the PLO, but they stayed in contact.

It seems that Kanafani regretted his time in Kuwait—or at least, did not find it fulfilling. He once told director Qasim Hawal not to go to the Gulf, especially not to Abu Dhabi, but to settle instead in Beirut. He told him, quite literally: “We just came out of Jordan and founded a magazine. Come with us—starve when we starve, feast when we feast.” This was shortly after the PLO departed from Amman, and it reflected Kanafani’s deep spirit of mobilization and commitment to collective national work. Hawal was one of Kanafani’s comrades from the late 1960s, during the final years of his life and his political engagement with Al-Hadaf magazine. Their meeting in Beirut wasn’t planned—it was one of those fateful encounters. Years later, during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut, Hawal directed a film adaptation of Kanafani’s most famous novella, Return to Haifa. It became the first feature film based on a Palestinian revolutionary novel. Even earlier, after Kanafani’s assassination, Hawal directed a short film titled The Word and the Rifle, which is a tribute to his life and legacy. [9]

Kanafani was a leading political thinker and an active educator of the Palestinian revolution. The 2024 publication Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings offers a glimpse into the depth of his political analysis—limited to what has been translated into English. In Arabic, his output was far more expansive. He wrote prolifically on socialism, revolutionary theory, the Palestinian cause, and anti-imperialist struggles across the region. His writings were rigorous, his arguments tightly constructed, and his intellectual influence extended far beyond Palestine. As Sabri Jiryis once remarked, Kanafani was doing the heavy thinking. One of the most formative moments in his political life came in 1970, during the Jordanian regime’s campaign—coordinated with other Arab governments—to crush the Palestinian revolutionary movement, its groups, and guerrilla forces. This period sharpened Kanafani’s political praxis and deepened his theoretical commitments [10]. 

Kanafani gave an important lecture at the Beirut conference in March 1968, during a crucial transition in PLO leadership, as armed guerrilla groups were emerging as the dominant force, especially in the wake of the Battle of Karameh against a Zionist invasion in Jordan, by February 3, 1969, Yasser Arafat assumed the presidency of the Executive Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization, at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council held in Cairo. His voice, theoretical framing, and revolutionary thought shaped these changes and fueled the people's will to overcome the 1967 Naksa [11].

His central thesis was to frame the failures of the Arab world and to answer the pressing question: why did Palestinian Arabs lose again in 1967? He introduced the concept of the “language of the blind,” which he defined as: “In the past ten years, what we might call a blind language has emerged in the region. And there is nothing more commonly used in our daily lives today than this blind language. Words have come to mean nothing unless framed vaguely, offering no protection or precision. Every writer now has their private dictionary, using words based on their understanding—an understanding that is not commonly agreed upon. As a result, the words mean nothing.” Kanafani shows how Arab discourse—on democracy, revolution, and change—became saturated with vague language, which paralyzed the power of the people. It silenced youth and barred them from offering new paths to liberation. He emphasized: “The problem was not that we did not know, but that we did not allow those who did know to speak or to act.” From this, he proposed a return to the idea of the party as an organization of the modern world. This reflects Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “new prince” in Machiavelli’s terms: the party as the structure capable of organizing, mobilizing, and recruiting the revolutionary spirit of youth [12].

Abu Ali Mustafa, the military leader in the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine], said he first came to know of Ghassan through the “Mulhaq Falstin” Supplement of Al-Muharrir newspaper, which reached them in Jenin, in the West Bank, through smuggling. He met him for the first time after the launch of the Palestinian armed struggle following the defeat of 1967. He said:

"In that period, 1967 had arrived, and I met Ghassan face to face for the first time during his first visit to the military bases in the Jordan Valley. He asked me a lot about the interior [Palestinian territories] and the beginnings of the armed struggle... He asked me about the people and the geography and took notes. He asked me what was right and wrong in those beginnings. He asked me about the resources we started with, the organization, the popular mood... about the scenes." [13]

There, in the Jordan Valley, an ethnic cleansing campaign is now underway. Ghassan then told him about his study of the 1936 revolt, comparing it to the Palestine Liberation Organization-led revolution. This time, he said, the people are dispersed and displaced, the land is occupied, and on top of that, the Arab states are conspiring against the revolution—a radical difference. Kanafani was always deeply invested in the question of liberation. He understood how difficult that task was, especially under the conditions we continue to face. But his life—his ideas, his relationships, his roles—offers ways to think about persistence, about resisting through every act and position one takes. In my piece, I wanted to show how the lesser-known, often overlooked fragments of his life reveal so much about what it means to live as a Palestinian and a revolutionary.

Bibilography

[1] Romman Cultural Magazine. Ghassan Kanafani’s Diaries... (1959-1965) (1/2). Link here https://rommanmag.com/archives/18633

[2] Kanafani, Adnan. Ghassan Kanafani: Folded Pages. Kuwait: Nashri Electronic Publishing House, 2003. eBook. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12378936

[3] Ghassan Kanafani. “Shams Jadida [A New Sun].” Al-Adab, no. 2 (February 1, 1957).  https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/255/18587/420406

[4] Al-Naqeeb, Fadl. Hakadha Tantahi al-Qisas... Hakadha Tabdaʾ [Thus Stories End... Thus They Begin. Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Abhath al-ʿArabiyya, 1983.

[5] Kanafani, Anni. "Interview with Anni Kanafani: I Imagine Ghassan Sitting with Us." Interview by Ayham al-Sahli and Taghrid Abdelal. Institute for Palestine Studies, Arts & Culture Blog, July 20, 2022. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1652961 & "Ghassan Kanafani fi Dhikrahu al-‘Ishrīn" [Ghassan Kanafani on His Twentieth Memorial]. Al-Ādāb, no. 7–8 (July 1, 1992).

[6] Darwish, Mahmoud. A Gazelle Heralding an Earthquake: In Memory of the Martyr Ghassan Kanafani. Register of the Immortals, Vol. 2, Central Media Office of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, pp. 200–205. https://palestine-memory.org/ & Kanafani, Ghassan. “al-Adab al-Filastini al-Muqawim taḥta al-Iḥtilāl 1948–1968” Palestinian Resistance Literature under Occupation, 1948–1968. Cyprus: Rimal Publications, 2015. (Published Originally in 1968)

[7] Interview with Anni Kanafani In"Ghassan Kanafani fi Dhikrahu al-‘Ishrīn" [Ghassan Kanafani on His Twentieth Memorial]. Al-Ādāb, no. 7–8 (July 1, 1992).

[8] Sabri Jiryis - Fassuta. Interview Conducted by the Author on 18 April 2025, through Zoom.

[9] Bdeir, Ahmad Naim. “Qasem Hawal Tells Al-Hadaf: ‘This Is How I Lived with Ghassan Kanafani and Knew Him!’” Al-Hadaf, July 8, 2025, link here

[10] Kanafani, Ghassan. Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings. Edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi. Paperback ed. October 20, 2024. 

[11]  “An Important Document: From the Thought of Ghassan Kanafani – Reflections on Change and the ‘Language of the Blind’.” Originally presented at the “Beirut Seminar” in March 1968. Published in Al-Hadaf Magazine, Special Issue on the 16th Anniversary of His Martyrdom, July 1988.

[12] Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1971. "The Modern Prince."

[13] Al-Hadaf Magazine, Year 1, Issue No. 1320, July 2001. https://fada.birzeit.edu/handle/20.500.11889/6552

The South Caucasus After the Dance

By Ibrahim Can Eraslan

There is an ongoing debate among internet users from the South Caucasus nations about the origin of the Sabre Dance, one of the most iconic sequences in Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian’s 1941 Gayane Ballet. Some argue that it reflects Armenian motifs, given that Khachaturian was ethnically Armenian. Others insist that no such Armenian dance tradition exists. It is indeed true that Khachaturian was Armenian, born and raised in Tbilisi—now the capital of Georgia—and later educated in Moscow[1]. Thus, he was a Soviet artist, and if the Sabre Dance signifies anything, it is the fraternity of the peoples of the Caucasus. This explains why so many see themselves reflected in it.

However, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this region—where peoples and cultures were historically intertwined—plunged into bloody instability. The same nations that once danced together in Gayane turned on one another. As in many other post-Soviet countries, imperialism rapidly asserted itself in the region, bringing with it various propaganda apparatuses, mafia-capitalist networks, and fierce competition over natural resources.

While regional nations still maintain deep ties with Russia—including widespread Russian-language fluency—these historical connections do little to simplify the present complexities. The most recent episode in this unfolding situation began with a police operation in Yekaterinburg, targeting a group connected to the Azerbaijani diaspora, known as the Seferov brothers. According to Russian authorities, they were operating as a criminal organization. Over the years, multiple incidents—including murders and illegal alcohol sales—had occurred around their restaurant.[2]

Following this, Azerbaijan conducted its own raid on the Baku office of Sputnik, the Russian state media outlet, based on similar allegations.[3] It is important to note that, much like in Yekaterinburg, none of the Azerbaijani charges were based on newly discovered evidence. This clearly suggests that the operations are political in nature. While some argue over the technicalities—such as the fact that the individuals arrested in Russia are Russian citizens and therefore the issue is not international—such legalistic distractions obscure the political character of the events. In summary: Russia claims it is cracking down on organized crime, while Azerbaijan accuses Russia of targeting its nationals.

Notably, one of the first leaders to contact Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev after the incident was Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. This raises questions about the evolution of recent tensions.[4]

However, relationships weren’t always bad. When Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Azerbaijan, he stayed at Aliyev’s residence.[5] This gesture carried many meanings—trust, fraternity, continuity. After all, Ilham Aliyev's father, Heydar Aliyev, was appointed Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers in 1982, rising to become the Soviet Union’s “third man.” The last decade has seen significant shifts in the South Caucasus. Though this article does not focus on Georgia or Armenia, recent developments—European Union-aligned protests in Georgia (which some describe as a “color revolution”), Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan’s visit to Turkey, internal disputes involving the Armenian Church, and now the Azerbaijan–Russia confrontation—all reflect a pattern.

The real rupture in Azerbaijan–Russia relations likely occurred in 2024, when a plane traveling from Baku to Grozny was reportedly downed, with suspicions pointing to Russia. Since then, Azerbaijan has awaited an apology, and subsequently shut down the Russian cultural centers known as Russkiy Dom—key institutions in countries where Russian embassies operate.[6]

During the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Russia refrained from providing direct military aid to Armenia, a move interpreted by some as tacit approval of Azerbaijan’s military operations. It was also seen as a response to Pashinyan’s pro-Western orientation. Armenia, in turn, suspended its membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).[7] While Azerbaijan may have viewed these developments favorably, it is significant that Putin hosted both Pashinyan and Aliyev after the first war—and that these meetings were held in Russian, underscoring Moscow’s symbolic role.

However, a new phase began when Azerbaijan started receiving support from Turkey and Israel. Since then, Putin has not hosted any more trilateral meetings. Russia increasingly found itself sidelined. Pashinyan’s Western alignment strained relations with Moscow, while Aliyev—buoyed by military victory—deepened ties with Turkey and Israel, effectively replacing Russia's role in the region. After the full retaking of Karabakh, the presence of Russian peacekeepers lost its rationale.

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Where is Azerbaijan turning its gaze?

The fact that Azerbaijani fuel is transported to Israel via Turkey helps clarify matters[8]. The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline also offers a potential alternative to Russian energy routes. The European Union's renewed interest in Central Asia is not coincidental—it is directly tied to its broader strategy of sidelining Russia in all strategic domains. And we must remember: the ultimate target of this project is China.

The political landscape of post-Soviet countries often takes shape around being “pro-Russia” or “anti-Russia.” This has been evident in Moldova, Central Asia, Georgia, and Armenia. In Armenia, recent events include not only Pashinyan’s confrontation with the church but also the arrest of Karapetyan—one of the country's wealthiest figures, a Russian citizen, and someone outside the traditional ecclesiastical elite. But Azerbaijan does not fit into this binary pattern. There is no pro-Russian opposition figure or faction that can be mobilized internally. This is due to both Azerbaijan’s internal political dynamics and its external alliances.

Power in Azerbaijan is not easily challenged. Ilham Aliyev is not only the son of Heydar Aliyev but also the victor of the Karabakh War, with no significant rival in sight. Thus, while it is reasonable to speak of coup plots by pro-Russian forces in Armenia or pro-European uprisings in Georgia, such frameworks do not apply to Azerbaijan. As a result, Russia has turned to one of the few tools available in its arsenal: intervening in criminal networks and informal economic circuits linked to Azerbaijani actors within its borders. This is where the heart of the story lies.

Has the encirclement of Russia in the South Caucasus begun?

The region is a crucial corridor for energy transit and holds potential as a logistical hub via the Black Sea in the Belt and Road Initiative. After the Soviet collapse, the region roughly split into two camps: Turkey–Azerbaijan and Iran–Armenia. But the 2008 Georgia crisis, NATO’s Black Sea partnership with Georgia, and the color revolution that brought Pashinyan to power have complicated this landscape.

Azerbaijan, for a long time, resisted being drawn into this encirclement. The main reason was persistent Western pressure over the Karabakh issue.

What changed this equation?

The logic is simple. For decades, European development depended on three key factors: cheap energy from Russia, market access to China, and surplus labor from war-torn Yugoslavia and peripheral regions like Turkey. After Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Europe’s industrial sector has suffered from energy shortages. Meanwhile, the Chinese market is no longer as accessible—Chinese goods are more affordable and digitally advanced than their European counterparts. While some have proposed a new India–Europe trade corridor, when it comes to energy, the South Caucasus presents itself as a viable alternative.

It must be emphasized: Azerbaijanis and Turks speak mutually intelligible Turkic languages and belong to the same ethno-linguistic family. This makes their cooperation natural. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s public appeal to the people of Iran, and the presence of 30 million Azerbaijanis in Iran*[9], also deserve attention in this context. Pashinyan’s visit to Turkey should be interpreted in this light—and we must not forget that Turkey possesses NATO’s second-largest army after the United States.

Thus, Azerbaijan occupies a position that somewhat diverges from the typical post-Soviet portrait. Its potential role in transporting Central Asian energy to Europe, its ability to leverage ties with NATO-member Turkey, its relevance to Iran due to its large Azerbaijani population, and its energy relations with Israel all place Azerbaijan in a key position—perhaps even a decisive one.

Today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. The Gayane Ballet is no longer performed. Once, this dance embodied the harmony of fraternal Caucasian peoples. But now, the dancing has stopped, and only the sabres remain.

The essential question is this: will those sabres be turned against imperialism, or will they become instruments of a new imperialist project to expand markets and exploit labor?

Notes

[1] https://www.therightnotes.org/aram-khachaturian.html

[2] https://mash.ru/news/207599/

[3] https://report.az/hadise/din-in-sputnik-azerbaycan-agentliyinin-ofisinde-emeliyyatdan-fotoreportaj/

[4] https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/prezident-ukrayini-proviv-rozmovu-z-prezidentom-azerbajdzhan-98773

[5] https://president.az/en/articles/view/66701

[6] https://azerbaijan.rs.gov.ru/news/priostanovleno-2/

[7] https://www.specialeurasia.com/2025/03/10/armenia-csto-analysis/

[8] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/azerbaijan-maintains-oil-sales-israel-despite-turkish-backlash-says-report

[9] I used an Azerbaijani source because I couldn't find a complete bibliography. In other words, whether it is a completely accurate number or not can be compared within the framework of different sources, but here, Azerbaijan's claim will be important within the scope of various future claims. As a result, Azerbaijan may enter into a process based on its own claim.

The Nakba Never Ended

[Pictured: A mural by Emmalene Blake in Dublin expresses solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza [Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters]

By Eyad Alkurabi

Last month, as the state of Israel continued to starve and exterminate the people of the Gaza strip, massacre Palestinians in the west bank, and gaslight and delegitimize Palestinians in the diaspora and our friends and allies worldwide, Palestinians marked the 77th commemoration of the Nakba – our catastrophe, the founding of Zionist state. But the Nakba has never ended. In fact, it has been ongoing.

It has been 77 years of ongoing agony. With every step we take, Palestinians remind ourselves that we stand on the shoulders of giants. In my own family, we have been freedom fighters on both sides since the 1920’s – because our people’s catastrophe did not begin in 1948, it began decades before with the arrival of Zionism, bringing many massacres even before the time we commemorate as Nakba.  Beginning in the 1920’s entire villages were ethnically cleansed, sometimes entire family lines wiped out. The Zionist settlers and militias did to us exactly what had once been done to indigenous Americans. Untold thousands were killed between the 1920’s and the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ultimately and forcibly expelled from their lands. Today, we carry our parents’ and grandparents’ keys, and we carry their hopes that the next generation can one day return home.  Until then, we as their descendants must continue showing up for our people wherever we are and whoever we are, no matter how high the personal cost or how difficult the work may be for us.

Every Palestinian family has its stories. On my mother’s side, they tell of sheltering a family of Jewish Holocaust refugees who eventually intermarried with our family. And when the Nakba came, those Holocaust survivors had to flee again to Syria, where many of our family then died in the Syrian civil war. One of my father’s earliest memories is from the age of four, when he was playing on the floor of his home while his mother made rice pudding. When a bomb suddenly landed next door, he fell into the pot of rice pudding and scalded his arms.

And our Nakba, our mass catastrophe that we were forced to swallow, reared its ugly head again in 2023. But it never actually ended, because Israel is addicted to killing Palestinians. Every year, they need a refill on the script — a refill that is perpetually funded by the United States of America with seemingly no limits. We need to take the corrupt doctor’s license away and achieve an arms embargo now!

I hope you will educate yourselves about places like Al-Tira ’Haifa and Dar Yasin to better understand how the genocide of our people began. I ask you to visit the website Palestine Remembered where Nakba survivors document the stories of their lands, their homes, and their families.

Palestinians are so often asked to condemn violence and terrorism, perhaps because we are assumed to be violent and terroristic people. So, I also hope that you will also ask yourself what you would do in our shoes?

What would you do if your entire family had been killed by the time you were 18 years old?

What would you do if you’d been blockaded your entire life?

What would you do if you were just a fisherman trying to catch something to eat only to be shot at for fishing? Or if the only food you could get had to be approved, had to be allowed in, had to be given to you by the calorie?

What if you had no clean water for yourself or your family, and it was deemed illegal for you to even collect rainwater from your own rooftop?

If your political leaders, even the most peaceful among them, were in constant danger of being imprisoned, often with no charges, for years on end? And what would you do if every form of peaceful resistance that you tried was met with violent suppression?

The best time to get involved in the struggle for Palestinian liberation was before October 7th. But the second best time is now. We hope you will join us by showing up and getting involved in the Palestinian Rights Committee and/or the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and by educating yourself about the facts of our struggle so that you can educate others.

Being a Neurodivergent Palestinian Gay man is a journey. However, through the amazing sumud and love of my communities, we are steadfast and pushing through. Although we carry our own individual trauma and our collective trauma, we as Palestinians and our friends love each other so much that we carry on and through.

If you wish to push for change, I ask that you consider the following steps:

• Persuade your local city and county to have binding BDS resolutions.

• Encourage your representative in congress to demand that AIPAC gets audited and gets labeled as a foreign entity.

• Demand an end to the siege, genocide, and blockade.

• Demand an immediate release of all Palestinian hostages, which are in the thousands.

• Write letters to editors to combat propaganda and provide a differing viewpoint.

• Bring up the Palestinian struggle and story at the kitchen table! Talk to your friends and loved ones.

• Get involved, protest, agitate, educate, and organize

We have the ability to make an impact — big and small and in between. Let’s utilize our abilities and, since we are in the belly of the beast, let’s get together and bring more peace and justice on this earth. 

No boots on the ground, no bombs in the air, US out of everywhere.

The Sordid History of US Intervention in Iran

[Pictured: Protesters hold a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the 1979 revolution.]

By Joyce Chediac

Republished from Liberation News.

Washington just staged an unsuccessful attempt at regime change in Iran. The U.S. continues to call out the Islamic Republic as “dangerous” and “repressive.” What would the U.S. want for Iran? For 26 years the U.S. actually ruled that country. An examination of the period reveals what the U.S.  might really wish today for the Iranian people.

Iran is a formidable country. With 92 million people, it has the largest population in West Asia. Iran has 10% of the world’s oil reserves and 15% of its gas reserves, the third and second largest world reserves respectively. It has many key minerals and great tracts of arable land. It borders eight countries, and has coastlines on two key waterways. Its territorial waters extend 12 miles into the 21-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz, one of the most strategic waterways in the world, where a fifth of the world’s ships carrying oil and natural gas pass through.

Iran was long regarded by the Western colonial powers not as a country with people who have rights and needs, but as a prize to be snatched. For decades it was dominated by Britain, and its oil syphoned off by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), leaving the people of Iran in poverty and underdevelopment.

The CIA’s very first coup was in Iran

After fighting themselves to exhaustion in World War II, the European colonial powers were much weakened, providing a space for many in the Global South to assert independence. Iran was one of these countries.

 In 1951 Iran’s Parliament voted to nationalize the oil industry controlled by Britain and elected the leading proponent of nationalization, Mohammed Mossadegh, as Prime Minister.  The nationalization was very popular. It reflected the population’s widespread dissatisfaction with foreign exploitation and desire for greater sovereignty.

Other forces were at work, however. With the European colonialist regimes weakened, the U.S. emerged as the strongest imperialist power after World War II, hungry to assert itself as the new world colonizer. 

To aid in this effort the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was formed  in 1947 to function outside the law and exempt from congressional oversight. In 1953 the covert agency cut its teeth by overthrowing the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh and seizing the nationalized Iranian oil.

 The CIA actually bragged that the coup was “an American project from beginning to end.”  It was first of many CIA coups, launching what Washinton rulers and their Wall Street backers named “The American Century.”  

The New York Times wrote its colonialist view of the coup on Aug. 6, 1954:

“Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism. It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran’s experience will prevent the rise of Mossadeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders.”

The “more reasonable and more far-seeing leader” that Washington chose to replace Mossadegh was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a Swiss-educated aristocrat. Pahlavi was installed as an absolute monarch, the Shah of Iran.

To keep their new client in power the U.S. then financed, formed and trained SAVAK, the notorious and deadly secret police, to destroy the significant opposition to the coup.

Five CIA officers, including specialists in covert operations, intelligence analysis, and counterintelligence, “trained virtually all of the first generation of SAVAK personnel,” according to the Iran Encyclopedia. The trainers included Major General Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, whose son, Norman Schwartzkopf Jr.,  was to lead the murderous the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Operation Desert Storm, in 1991.

SAVAK was given the power to make arbitrary arrests, detain indefinitely without charges and to extract confessions through torture.  It decimated  an entire generation of militants, revolutionaries and progressives.

Mosaddegh’s group, the National Front, was outlawed and most of its leaders arrested. The Tudah (Masses) Party, Iran’s communist party, was virtually destroyed. Over 4000 members were arrested, at least 14 killed by torture and over 200 sentenced to life imprisonment.

But the U.S. was doing fine. With Iran’s oil controlled by a consortium of Western companies, American firms gained considerable control over Iranian oil production. U.S. companies took  around 40% of the profits. Politically, Iran acted as an important counterweight to the Soviet Union, which it bordered.

The Nixon Doctrine, announced in 1969, called for Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia to be the guardians of Washington’s interests in the Middle East at a time when the U.S. military was bogged down in a losing war in Vietnam. 

U.S. aid to Israel soared to billions of dollars annually. The Pentagon built Iran’s military into one of the largest in the world, growing Iran’s defense budget some 800% over four to five years.  By 1977 it was ranked fifth globally.  Its job was to be Washington’s policemen in the Persian Gulf.

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Economic development lines pockets of rich, hurts the workers

The Shah’s 1963 “White Revolution,” a plan for economic development much acclaimed in the U.S. at the time, would be called pure neoliberalism today. 

The economy grew significantly during these years primarily due to oil proceeds that were finally coming into the country’s economy. Prior to the nationalization of oil, the British gave Iran virtually nothing for the oil they were plundering. The CIA coup of 1953 violently defeated the movement for the nationalization of oil. But the new arrangement under the US-installed system did give Iran approximately half of the oil proceeds, a concession in hopes of preventing future anti-imperialist mass movements.

Economic development was uneven as projects prioritized what brought profits to foreign companies, not to mention the huge military spending that syphoned much of the oil profits right back to the US and its defense contractors.

Some 85% of the of wealth that remained in the country went to a small elite. The majority of the population remained untouched. In the poorest areas in the southeast, where by UN data 55% of the population lived below the poverty line, Iranians were dying of hunger.

Rapid militarization and foreign economic penetration brought inflation which decreased the purchasing power of the poor. Many small farmers unable to make a living migrated into the cities and joined the ranks of the unemployed there where rapid urbanization had created housing shortages and poor living conditions.

The Shah’s secret alliance with Israel

Israeli Foreign Ministry documents declassified in recent years reveal that Israel had extensive and exceptional relations with the Shah’s regime. The documents reveal that on Feb. 23, 1966, Mordechai Gazit, Director of the the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department wrote, “Iran-Israel relations are a kind of unwritten secret alliance that gives Israel a range of advantages in the fields of the economy, security, the Middle East and anti-Nasserism.”

Over the years Israel purchased a significant part of, and sometimes all, of its oil from the Shah’s regime, while Iran used Israel as a middleman to sell its oil to third countries.

There was much military cooperation. Israel had close ties to SAVAK.  While Iran never officially recognized Israel, the Shah had secret representation in Tel Aviv since 1961, while Israel had permanent representation in Tehran which, at one point, was an embassy with military attachés. In 1967 the Iranian prime minister asked the Israeli military attache to train  the head of his bodyguards. Iranian police received training in operating communications equipment at Motorola in Israel. Between 1968 and 1972 Iran bought some $63 million in military equipment from Israel.        

The Shah throws ‘the most expensive party in modern history’ while Iranians starve

Instead of using Iran’s petrodollars to address poverty and inequality, the Shah threw for himself what was then called “the most expensive party in modern history.”

In 1971 he flew in 18 tons of food prepared by the French restaurant Maxims to celebrate what he called the 2,500 anniversary of his dynasty, and to celebrate himself. For days he entertained 60 kings, queens and heads of state at luxury tents in the desert at the ancient ruins of Persepolis. This waste of resources while people were hungry became a symbol of his total detachment from his people and a rallying cry for a need for major change.

Meanwhile, the Shah’s regime grew even more repressive. After 1972 those committing alleged political crimes were tried before secret military tribunals, without witnesses or defense lawyers, and with guilt determined solely based on SAVAK’s evidence.

There was no such thing as freedom of speech or association. The press was strictly censored, with the Shah decreeing that every newspaper with a circulation of less than 3,000 and periodicals with a circulation of less than 5,000 be shut down. From 1975 to 1978, political activity was restricted to participation in the Rastakhiz Party, the Shan’s party, membership in which was mandatory for everyone.

Trade unions were outlawed and workers who protested for better conditions could be imprisoned or killed. Academic freedom was  restricted and students and university teachers were subjected to surveillance by SAVAK.

‘A history of torture which is beyond belief’

Human rights groups charged Iran with having the worst record of political repression in the world.  Amnesty International reported in 1975 that Iran had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief.”

A 1976 New York Times article said, “There are 100,000 political prisoners and there have been 300 official executions in the last three years in Iran, according to figures of Amnesty International, Le Monde, and other European newspapers, and the international Federation of Human Rights.”

By the late 1970s the anger of the people of Iran at their U.S. imperialist exploiters and their repressive puppet Shah was at a boiling point. People look to those who were  the most militant and intransigent against U.S. imperialism for leadership. They turned to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shia cleric exiled by the Shah in 1964. For years he had been recording on cassette tapes fiery messages excoriating U.S. imperialism and calling for the arrest and trial of the Shah.  These tapes were circulated throughout Iran. At one point,  90,000 mosques were duplicating and distributing them.

Anti-government demonstrations began in October 1977. Protests even reached the U.S., as Iranian students at U.S. universities lost no opportunity to confront visiting Iranian officials and members of the Shah’s family with picket lines and chants of “The Shah is a U.S. puppet, down with the Shah!

The movement brought together a wide array of groups, including radical clerics, left activists, people from various social groups, including clergy, intellectuals, and merchants, ethnic minorities and millions of workers. Economic demands were made, though the protests also raised the political demands of an end to martial law and the release of political prisoners.

In 1978 the revolution grew into a broad-based uprising that paralyzed the country. Labor strikes began with oil workers in five cities taking to the streets. They spread everywhere until they immobilized the economy. Giant demonstrations took place in every city.

Troops on rooftops opened fire on the crowds, committing many massacres. But the killings only further infuriated the population. Some actually came to protests wearing white Islamic burial shrouds in defiance of the troops and signaling that they were willing to die to liberate their country.

By the end of the year the hated Shah was a prisoner in his own palace, backed only by his generals and the hated SAVAK. On Jan. 16, 1979, the U.S  quickly whisked him out of the country.

After 14 years of exile, Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran on Feb. 1, 1979 to jubilant supporters. A referendum on creating an Islamic Republic was held on March 30 and 31, 1979 and overwhelmingly approved. Khomeini became the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

‘We used to run this country … Now we don’t even run our own embassy’

Days after Khomeini returned, and after a demonstration briefly attacked  the U.S. embassy in Tehran,  an American diplomat  preparing to leave bitterly commented, “We used to run this country…Now we don’t even run our own embassy.”  His astonishment was typical of flabbergasted U.S. officials.

Never concerned about the plight of the Iranian people, the Shah’s U.S. backers were oblivious to the significant internal struggle taking place. Only a year before the Shah had to run from the country he was praised by then-President Jimmy Carter in a New Year’s Eve toast that called Iran “an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.”

A New York Times article of March 11, 1979  expressed the astonishment of the political establishment here and their total underestimation of the Iranian people:

 “How could Iran, with its oil and its strategic situation between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf, between Europe and the Middle East, fall under the sway of a holy man out of the mists of the 13th century? How could the shah, a monarch who commanded more tanks than the British Army, more helicopters than the United States First Cavalry in Vietnam, be pressured so neatly out of power?”

Iranian Revolution changed West Asia

The Iranian Revolution was a game-changer. Its demonstration of the power of mass uprisings to overthrow colonial regimes inspired oppressed people in the Muslim world and throughout the Global South.

It not only kicked the U.S. out, it also changed the geopolitical landscape and power balance in West Asia. For 46 years now, despite severe economic sanctions imposed by Washington and the whole imperialist camp, the Iranian people still assert their right to self-determination and are aiding others in the region to do so as well.  

To this day, where the people of the world see the Iranian Revolution as a taking back of natural resources and a restoration of rights and dignity, the U.S. government just sees the loss of a very strategic and lucrative asset. This is why regime change has been the State Department’s goal in Iran ever since 1979.

On the Limits of Legalism Against Empire

By Ibrahim Can Eraslan

It is well known that imperialism has long maintained an aggressive stance toward Iran. This includes periodic attacks on Iranian territories, the assassination of personnel, economic sanctions, and even the use of propaganda tools aimed at regime change. The reasons behind these actions by imperialist powers are beyond the scope of this article, but it is evident that the ultimate target is China. On the other hand, Iran also holds significant importance for Russia. The Caucasus region, after all, is crucial to Russia’s security interests.

In order to achieve all these objectives, imperialism carries out its dirty work through Israel — as even German Chancellor Merz has stated — and the West responds to this with so-called “respect.”[1] Israel is able to carry out these actions in front of the entire world. All of this is framed by the West as a kind of civilizational war against Arabs or Muslims, with Israel cast as the protagonist.

What makes this possible is, of course, the fact that Israel is not merely a nation-state acting on its own. It is an indispensable tool of imperialism in the region. Moreover, the global reach of Zionist media propaganda and the immense financial support it receives from the West (which Trump himself actually criticized during his election campaign) provide Israel both the courage and the means to construct its own narrative.

In other words, Israel is acting with a specific mission. It serves as a battering ram for Western imperialism in the region, aiming at the destruction of anti-imperialist forces and the redrawing of borders. In this context, the increasingly aggressive stance toward Pakistan also gains significance, and it is meaningful to highlight the close ties between India and Israel. After all, without such a comprehensive campaign, halting China's economic rise becomes an extremely difficult scenario for Western imperialists. The elimination of anti-imperialist forces in the region simultaneously opens up new centers of exploitation for the West. This is why the targeting of China and Israel's role as the battering ram gains strategic importance for imperialism.

Thus, Israel’s assignment here goes beyond the ontological foundations of the Zionist narrative. Israel’s history —and its deep entanglement with imperialist powers — reveals that the matter at hand is not one of religion or culture, but fundamentally a class struggle. Accordingly, the stance of international legal mechanisms toward Israel should also be interpreted through the lens of class struggle, and the hypocrisy of international law must be understood in this context as well.

In its recent conflicts with Iran, it is clear that Israel is the aggressor. From the perspective of international law, this is not a disputable claim. Moreover, within the last six months, Israel has launched attacks on Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria — and in three of these cases, it continues to maintain a de facto occupation. What is being done in Gaza and the West Bank is evident to all.

So then, why do the United Nations and its conventions not apply equally to all states? Why is there discrimination?

Undoubtedly, the concept of “humanity” as referred to in United Nations rhetoric is a costly one. In a world dominated by capitalism, this means that, whether under the label of “humanitarian intervention/aid” or “the fight against international terrorism,” imperialism can intervene in any conflict, rebellion, or — as in the case of Iran — against an official government, using any method it chooses. Or, as recalled from the Iraq invasion, it’s not merely about seeking authorization from the UN, but about CIA agents obtaining “diplomatic or other official identities”.[2]

Of course, the principles laid out in various international legal texts regarding human rights or the use of force by states may initially create a positive impression for many. However, as I mentioned above, these are concepts lacking in substance and are costly within the capitalist system. The universalization of these costly concepts is problematic precisely because of their Western origin. In capitalism, if you invest in something, you expect to profit from it. Therefore, investment in “humanity” is only measured in terms of its profitability. In this sense, a set of principles that emerged in a particular historical context and in response to specific social developments — and that bear the cultural and political imprint of that environment — being declared valid for all humanity is ethically questionable from many angles.

Imperialism reveals itself even within the principles of international law, as international law is fundamentally shaped by the logic of unipolarity.

From this, it can be said that Israel and the unipolar essence of international law are mutually compatible. It follows logically that international law would not punish a “child” born from its own core — or if it does, the punishment would still serve to protect that same core.

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However, a core issue here is that Israel’s actions cannot be justified even within the narrative of capitalist legality. Israel’s defense relies on the doctrine of “preemptive self-defense,” or in other words, “preventive attack.” To understand what these terms mean, one must examine Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which regulates the right to self-defense. Article 51 is the exception to the prohibition on the use of force as established in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

So, what is preemptive self-defense?

In short, preemptive self-defense is an expanded interpretation of the traditional right to self-defense. Let us take a look at Article 51 of the Charter:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”[3]

It can thus be seen that this right is not one that entirely sidelines the United Nations or turns warfare into a fundamental exception to general international legal norms. Rather, it is a provision intended to address potential defense gaps in situations where the UN is unable to intervene immediately.

Of course, the use of force in self-defense is a legitimate right. However, as the term “self-defense” itself implies, this right must first be triggered — it must be born out of a concrete threat. The primary condition for the emergence of this right is that an armed attack must be directed against the state. In other words, Israel cannot invoke the right of self-defense based on a mere suspicion of nuclear weapons and the hysteria that “Iran might use them” — especially when the only nuclear arsenal in the region belongs to them.

It is also important to emphasize that Iran is a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), whereas Israel is not. Israel is estimated to possess between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads.[4] If there is no attack to be defended against, then there is also nothing to defend, meaning that in such circumstances, “preemptive self-defense” does not fall within the scope of Article 51.

Of course, since the term “armed attack” does not have a universally accepted definition, this issue remains open to debate. However, the relevant provision in the UN General Assembly’s Resolution A/3314 of 14 December 1974, titled “Definition of Aggression”, is as follows:

“Aggression is the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations, as set out in this Definition.’’[5]

Therefore, as can be seen, this is not a general right but an exceptional one. Iran is also not acting in violation of the relevant regulations and resolutions. In other words, this exceptional right does not grant states the authority to strike others simply because of hostile relations; it is merely a provision designed to address a potential gap in defense.

One might argue, as part of Israel’s defense, that Iran supports terrorist attacks against Israel. However, in this regard, the Nicaragua Case offers a clarifying precedent. In its judgment, the International Court of Justice ruled that a state’s support for armed groups operating in another state does not amount to an armed attack and therefore is not equivalent to one.

“The Court has already indicated (paragraph 238) its conclusion that the conduct of the United States towards Nicaragua cannot be justified by the right of collective self defence in response to an alleged armed attack on one or other of Nicaragua's neighbours. So far as regards the allegations of supply of arms by Nicaragua to the armed opposition in El Salvador, the Court has indicated that while the concept of an armed attack includes the despatch by one State of armed bands into the territory of another State, the supply of arms and other support to such bands cannot be equated with armed attack.’’[6]

It is clear that this situation has not been considered equivalent to an armed attack. In fact, it would be more appropriate for Iran — rather than Israel — to invoke such a defense.

Therefore, putting aside the vast ocean of doctrinal debates and legal terminology, the truth is that imperialist powers are able to cast aside the very laws they wrote, the international legal principles and norms they themselves defined, whenever it suits them. This same defense once appeared in the form of the Bush Doctrine, and we all know the consequences. In short, the concept of preemptive self-defense can be described as a notion fabricated by imperialism to override its own legal order.

The concept is better understood not by looking at processes through the lens of law, but by looking at the law through the lens of political processes. For example, Trump once threatened to intervene in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) under the pretext of preemptive self-defense.[7] But perhaps, unlike Iran, maybe the reason such an intervention was never carried out against DPRK is that DPRK actually possess nuclear weapons…

Finally, what I want to emphasize is this: attempting to challenge imperialism through existing legal norms is a well-intentioned effort, but believing that international legal mechanisms can take real and concrete steps against imperialism is, frankly, naïve. What South Africa has done should be applauded by all of humanity, and such examples must be multiplied. Only then can international law shed its one-sided character and begin to embody a multipolar structure — and once again, in today’s conditions, international law can only gain real applicability through a stance taken against imperialism.

Notes

[1]  Germany's Merz says Israel doing 'dirty work for us' in Iran – DW – 06/18/2025

[2] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/022399ritter-book.html

[3] https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml

[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-leaked-emails-colin-powell-says-israel-has-200-nukes/

[5] A/RES/29/3314 - Definition of Aggression - UN Documents: Gathering a body of global agreements

[6] Nicaragua v. United States of America, ICJ Decision of 27 June 1986 p.12

[7] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/19/trump-threatens-to-destroy-north-korea-if-necessary

Why is Imperialism So Easy to Love?

[Pictured: The Israeli and U.S. flags are projected on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City in celebration of the two countries’ close ties on Feb. 11, 2020. Photo credit: AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images]

By Yalda Slivo

Western imperial culture has always had the remarkable ability to romanticize and justify its violence as a form of virtue, where occupation becomes self-defense, former U.S. presidents become pop culture icons, and Israeli settlers are mythologized as liberators.

It would be easy to frame this as propaganda and move on, but the dialectic between representation, culture, and politics has enabled imperialism to suppress, or even prevent, the development of a coherent material critique within dominant Western liberal discourse – in many ways erasing its own violence. This happens when different political actors adapt their language and behaviour to align with the hegemonic cultural norms of the West, sometimes even abandoning their anti-imperialist or anti-colonial principles in the process.

The palestinian marxist, Ghassan Kanafani, was among the first to formulate the idea how the Zionist entity enforced its occupation via Zionist literature and culture in his 1967 text, On Zionist Literature. He laid out a detailed description of how Zionism worked culturally in order to justify its occupation via “Jewish heroes,” using literature as a way of mythologizing and constructing heroic settlers that served colonial expansion - but also enforcing the Hebrew language by institutionalizing it as an artificial way of kickstarting an oppressive culture, playing a huge role in the occupation of Palestine.

One of the questions Kanafani asked early in his text is, “Why does the Western reader accept the same racist and fascist positions in Zionist novels that are deemed to be contemptible when taken by non-Jews?” – to which his answer can be somewhat summarized by him paraphrasing historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who thought that the autonomy of the Jewish population in the form of a state would have to come at the expense of the West and not the Arabs, something for which he was laughed at.

Kanafani pointed to this as an example of Zionist propaganda having succeeded, with the ever-recurring argument that Hitler’s massacres were a good enough reason to build a fascist state in the already otherized Middle East. Toynbee, according to Kanafani, was met with “cries of laughter,” as Toynbee himself put it. This wasn’t just because the idea sounded absurd, even though it came from a place of sympathy and understanding. It was because, by 1961, the West had already entrenched itself in the logic of justifying political Zionism as a response to Hitler’s massacres and European antisemitism.

As influential as Edward Said was in providing the framework of Orientalism, Kanafani’s detailed analysis must be recognized as historically significant in its own right – particularly for how it exposed the cultural logic underpinning Zionist colonialism. Zionism had to be approved by Westerners through an adaptation of its colonial language, way of life and production of culture. However, this isn’t just history. Kanafani’s analysis of the ideological alliance between Israel and the United States is just as relevant today – if not more blatant. Since the genocide began in October 2023, the U.S. has used its veto power at the UN five times to block demands for an immediate ceasefire, even in the face of massacres in places like Rafah. The repetition of this pattern even after the deaths of thousands of civilians, reveals how deeply entrenched this alliance is. When Kanafani described it in the 1960s, it still operated through quiet complicity; today it’s an open diplomatic position. How many times have we heard that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” as if the genocide in Gaza were an act of self-defense?

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Meanwhile, violent settlers continue to rampage across the West Bank with direct support from the Israeli state – a concrete example of Kanafani’s core point: the occupation is not only military – It is ideological, normalized and protected by political silence.

This is how Israel’s genocide is allowed to continue without consequence, under the cover of narratives we’ve heard throughout the Gaza onslaught: that “Israel is defending the West,” that “if Israel falls, the West falls,” that this is really “a war between civilizations.” These aren’t just fringe statements, they’re structural expressions of a deeply rooted worldview. When Israeli president Isaac Herzog claimed in December 2023 that “the war in Gaza is about saving Western civilization,” and Dutch politician Geert Wilders declared in the Israeli parliament that “if Israel falls, the West falls,” they weren’t just posturing, they were articulating a normalized and rarely questioned narrative in which Israel functions as an extension of the West. A narrative used again and again to justify brutal repression.

This oppressive nature of Western culture seems to have no effect on its population engaging with it in terms of producing material and valuable criticisms on a mass scale. A few examples of this are how U.S. presidents who have committed countless war crimes and acted against international law seem to have little to no negative moral effect or bearing on the reproduction of Western culture at all. Instead, former U.S. presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama are thrown into the limelight and become pop culture icons. Now, is there something inherently rotten embedded within Western culture? Why are people, artists, and other cultural practitioners within the West so openly embracing figures that are viewed as war criminals in the Middle East by their equivalents? There seems to be a resemblance in the way Zionist literature glorified its “heroic settlers” and how the U.S. glorifies war criminals like Bush and Obama. These questions tie into my next example, which will veer off into realpolitik, ideology, and culture, further dialectically complicating the issue.

This logic of cultural adaptation to Western norms is not limited to Zionism. Historically, anti-imperialist movements have, at times, engaged with Western powers in ways that blur the line between resistance and accommodation. One of the most striking examples of this can be seen in the actions of Mao Zedong during the Sino-Soviet split. Despite having built a revolutionary ideology grounded in anti-colonial struggle and a fierce critique of Western bourgeois culture, Mao chose in 1971 to meet secretly with Henry Kissinger – one of the chief architects of U.S. imperialism.

Mao had up until that point organized the masses and developed a type of Marxism-Leninism that was deeply anti-imperialist and anti-colonial in its nature, ending what was known as the “century of humiliation” – specifically caused by the imperialists. He had earlier in his revolutionary days pointed to Western culture and bourgeois liberalism as something not only inherently rotten and parasitical but also inherently tied to imperialism, which was one of many reasons why China was filled with drug and opioid addicts.

Within Marxist tradition, the idea of how the superstructure works in practice had been further developed by communists like Antonio Gramsci, and before that, Karl Marx himself mentioned it in his critique of political economy. Mao himself viewed bourgeois ideology as a tool for imperialism, and Western culture therefore aimed to uphold capitalist hegemony – thus being oppressive and exploitative in its very nature and tied to capitalism. He would later in his life even kickstart the Cultural Revolution to finally phase out what he considered the Western bourgeois elements in the superstructure that had begun embedding and developing within Chinese society, making it revisionist, as he put it.

However, only one year after the first Kissinger visit, president Richard Nixon also visited China, which would later give the country a stronger international position until this day. The public at the time had little to no knowledge of the first meeting, and by the time the second meeting took place, the Chinese government had already embedded Kissinger in the Chinese public's eyes. This seems to have worked since from that point onward, Kissinger was widely regarded as a “friend of China” and continually traveled there right up until his death. So, in the same way as in Western societies, Chinese society seemed to have little to no problem from the bottom up with figures like Kissinger and Nixon.

It is worth mentioning that Kissinger made some concessions in this relationship with Communist China, in his true realpolitik nature - in order to isolate the USSR. This strategy seems to have worked, as the USSR would later collapse, further fueling Western imperial arrogance and enabling the rapid imposition of a neoliberal world order not only economically and militarily but also culturally.

Seeing how the West is willing to resort to what Kanafani referred to as “racist and fascist positions” whenever it seems fit, it’s no surprise that a culture built on justifying violence can compel even its former opponents to abandon anti-imperial commitments in favour of realpolitik. Kanafani noted that Zionist propaganda succeeded in embedding its logic in the Western reader’s mind, overriding even the simplest and most humane alternatives, a point echoed by Toynbee and dismissed with laughter.

This is not surprising for a civilization that didn’t need to look elsewhere to learn how to dominate, exploit or annihilate because it developed those capacities internally and enshrined them in its cultural identity. Mao’s shift toward diplomatic engagement with Kissinger wasn’t just geopolitical manoeuvring – it was a reflection of how deeply Western cultural hegemony operates, even among those who once opposed it. By legitimizing figures like Kissinger, China mirrored the same logic that allowed Zionist literature to mythologize settlers or American culture to sanitize war criminals like Bush and Obama.

In each case, whether it’s the glorification of Israeli settlers, the sanitization of U.S. war criminals or the rehabilitation of imperial figures like Kissinger – the same logic prevails: imperial violence becomes morally defensible, at times desirable, when embedded in the cultural forms of power. Through Kanafani’s critique of Zionist literature, Mao’s strategic shift toward the U.S. and the West’s mythologizing of its own brutality, we see how imperialism is not only exercised through tanks and treaties, but through stories, symbols and selective memory.

Imperial violence is not simply justified. It is aestheticized, ritualized and loved. And that love is reproduced. If imperialism has become easy to love, then the real question is: are we willing to unlearn it?

Debunking the "Tiananmen Square Massacre"

By Matthew John

Every June in the United States we are subjected to a barrage of anti-China propaganda from major media outlets and prominent political pundits (on top of the regularly-scheduled China bashing). The story has changed over the years and decades, but the original went something like this: On June 4, 1989, after weeks of student-led demonstrations, a gang of ruthless, authoritarian People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers entered Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and conducted a brutal, cold-blooded massacre of unarmed, peaceful “pro-democracy” protesters, resulting in hundreds - maybe thousands - of gruesome deaths. This vicious slaughter of innocent civilians illustrates just how much those filthy commies hate freedom and democracy, and the measures they are willing to take to prevent these superior ideals from taking root in their hellish, dystopian society. 

Despite being completely fictional, this popular narrative remains useful to the Western capitalist class as a method of demonizing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ongoing socialist development in the midst of Washington’s new Cold War. Recognizing this geopolitical reality, I sought to play my part in dismantling what is undoubtedly one of the most cherished anti-communist atrocity fabrications in the Western world. I hoped my contribution would become one of the last nails in this counterfeit chronicle’s coffin. After some rudimentary research, I felt compelled to survey my Instagram followers - an online community of about 65,000 users - by posing a simple question:

Do you believe there was a massacre (i.e. mass, indiscriminate murder of unarmed, peaceful protesters) by Chinese soldiers in early June, 1989 in Tiananmen Square (Beijing)?

The last time I checked this post, 821 people had participated, with 15 percent responding, “Yes,” and the remaining 85 percent responding, “No.” My page is very obviously communist in its political orientation, and I have posted about this topic several times before, in addition to my consistent efforts to debunk anti-communist propaganda more broadly. For several years, the bulk of my content has been unequivocally Marxist-Leninist in character and there has been an open effort to defend socialist countries (past and present) from what I see as unfair or disingenuous bourgeois criticism. Nevertheless, more than 120 respondents still expressed a belief in the conventional Western narrative (the “Tiananmen Square massacre”). Maybe I had not purged enough liberals. 

I further articulated the motivations behind this inquiry to my sizable leftist audience:

I've been reading mainstream summaries of the violence that broke out in the final days of the student protest movement and the myth of the Tiananmen Square massacre has largely already been debunked. But it's this weird Orwellian situation where, aside from a few Western journalists like Jay Mathews and Richard Roth, many mainstream sources just act like this whole "massacre" narrative never happened. Roth and Mathews have openly and explicitly acknowledged that there wasn't a massacre and that, as reporters, they have a responsibility to correct the record, as they themselves were complicit in spreading the initial lies. But other mainstream Western sources simply discuss the violence occurring in Beijing between rioters and soldiers, often correctly noting that protesters started the violence and even killed soldiers before the soldiers fought back. 

There is definitely a wide range of terms, phrases, etc. that these sources use, and the massacre narrative is sometimes still heavily implied (some, like the History Channel, continue to unequivocally state that a massacre occurred in the square). Strangely, if you read the relevant Wikipedia entry, for instance, they never even imply there was a massacre in the square, and are clear that the "protesters" (rioters) initiated the deadly violence in Beijing (none of which occurred in Tiananmen Square itself). Even the Victims of Communism website is nuanced and vague regarding this topic. What's interesting is that, from what I can tell, these sources themselves have largely abandoned the massacre narrative, while the general public continues to cling to the myth.

Indeed, I felt as though the “massacre” narrative itself had been massacred and left for dead. I momentarily gaslit myself, wondering if the myth I so diligently sought to debunk had been discarded and forgotten long ago. Let me break this down in more detail so you can see what I mean. As mentioned above, a number of mainstream Western commentators have openly rejected the “massacre” narrative, including Nicholas Kristof, Jay Mathews, Richard Roth, Graham Earnshaw, Eugenio Bregolt, Gregory Clark, and James Miles. Mathews covered the 1989 Tiananmen protests as Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. In 1998, nearly a decade after the events in question, the seasoned reporter published a controversial piece in the Columbia Journalism Review entitled, “The Myth of Tiananmen.” In it, Mathews laments the fact that “many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night,” referring to June 4, 1989. After recounting several examples of prominent American newspapers embracing and proliferating the Tiananmen Square “massacre” narrative, Mathews explains, “The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.”

The reporter then traces the myth to its likely origins and recalls an immediate but ineffective rebuttal:

Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. [...] Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. 

Matthews even acknowledged his own complicity in spreading the famous falsehood:

It is hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression. Rereading my own stories published after Tiananmen, I found several references to the “Tiananmen massacre.” At the time, I considered this space-saving shorthand.

This admission was comparable to that of BBC reporter James Miles, who “admitted that he had ‘conveyed the wrong impression’ and that ‘there was no massacre [in] Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops.’”

About a decade after the publication of the aforementioned piece by Jay Mathews, a CBS reporter named Richard Roth published a similar article, which was even more bluntly headlined, “There Was No ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre.’” Like Mathews, Roth reported on the 1989 student protests from Beijing, where he was at one point detained by Chinese authorities. Roth described what he saw while being transported through the Square in a military vehicle:

Dawn was just breaking. There were hundreds of troops in the square, many sitting cross-legged on the pavement in long curving ranks, some cleaning up debris. There were some tanks and armored personnel carriers. But we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had recently occurred in that place. 

The reporter also echoed a sentiment I expressed toward the beginning of this piece; a substantial change in tone over the years can be observed from mainstream Western sources who seemed to gradually adjust the language they used to describe this history, possibly best illustrated by the shift in terminology from “massacre” to “crackdown.” 

Shortly before the Roth piece, former Australian government official Gregory Clark published an op-ed in the Japan Times entitled, “The Birth of a Massacre Myth.” Clark brings up the aforementioned Jay Mathews piece, as well as three additional individuals I want to focus on briefly: Graham Ernshaw, Hou Dejian, and Eugenio Bregolat. Bregolat was Spanish ambassador who was in Beijing during the 1989 protests. Clark recalls an important point made by Bregolat, in which the ambassador observed that “Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew in the square at the time, and if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to see it and record it.” (I often ponder this aspect of the Tiananmen discourse - the complete lack of video or photographic documentation of this supposed “massacre” juxtaposed with the widespread, faith-based belief in a ghastly, yet unfounded story.) The two other prominent individuals Clark mentions, Reuters reporter Graham Ernshaw and protester Hou Dejian, were both in the Square when it was cleared and neither witnessed any violence conducted by soldiers, much less an epic, cold-blooded massacre of civilians.

In addition to these prominent, mainstream Western sources sporadically surfacing to acknowledge that there was indeed no massacre in Tiananmen Square, we also have corroboration in the form of leaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing relaying an account from Chilean diplomat Carlos Gallo:

[GALLO] WATCHED THE MILITARY ENTER THE SQUARE AND DID NOT OBSERVE ANY MASS FIRING OF WEAPONS INTO THE CROWDS, ALTHOUGH SPORADIC GUNFIRE WAS HEARD.  HE SAID THAT MOST OF THE TROOPS WHICH ENTERED THE SQUARE WERE ACTUALLY ARMED ONLY WITH ANTI-RIOT GEAR--TRUNCHEONS AND WOODEN CLUBS; THEY WERE BACKED UP BY ARMED SOLDIERS.  AS THE MILITARY CONSOLIDATED ITS CONTROL OF THE SQUARE'S PERIMETER, STUDENTS AND CIVILIANS GATHERED AROUND THE MONUMENT TO THE PEOPLE'S HEROES.  GALLO SAID WOUNDED, INCLUDING SOME SOLDIERS, CONTINUED TO BE BROUGHT TO THE RED CROSS STATION. 

Now that the “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative has been sufficiently debunked, an elephant remains in the room: the deadly violence that did occur in Beijing, serving as the final chapter of the 1989 student protests. As political commentator and socialist organizer Brian Becker wrote in 2014, “What happened in China, what took the lives of government opponents and of soldiers on June 4, was not a massacre of peaceful students but a battle between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the so-called pro-democracy movement.”

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The reality on the ground, as Mick Kelly wrote, was that “[t]here was in fact a rebellion, which was counter-revolutionary in nature, that was eventually put down by military force.” This violent chaos included urban warfare between PLA soldiers and rioters who had commandeered military vehicles, stolen rifles, and armed themselves with Molotov cocktails and an assortment of other armaments. At the time, the Washington Post recounted that “[o]n one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles.” 

Protesters killed and injured soldiers, who were often unarmed, in brutal ways, including beating them or burning them to death, and sometimes even stripping them and stringing up their lynched, charred corpses for all to see. Westerners are often surprised to learn that about two dozen soldiers and police officers (possibly more) died in these clashes. When the dust had settled, the death toll was likely around 300, which is certainly tragic and horrific, but far less jarring than the sensationally inflated Western estimates in the thousands.

After becoming acquainted with the true history of Tiananmen, it is useful to examine mainstream Western summaries of the events in question. Let’s start with Amnesty International’s “What is the Tiananmen Crackdown?”:

On 4 June 1989, Chinese troops opened fire on students and workers who had been peacefully protesting for political reforms in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hundreds – possibly thousands – of people were killed, including children and older persons. Tens of thousands more were arrested across China in the suppression that followed. 

This summary, despite falsely referring to the protests as “peaceful,” does make a concerted effort to not directly place the violence in the Square (although an average Western reader would likely miss this distinction and assume the excerpt is bolstering the conventional narrative). The students and workers had been protesting in and around the Square. They weren’t necessarily there when the crackdown occurred. But as I mentioned earlier, there is no “we need to be extra clear and correct some widespread misconceptions” moment. It’s all very calculated and intentionally deceptive. The same is true of this summary from the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian:

On the night of June 3 and 4, the People’s Liberation Army stormed the Square with tanks, crushing the protests with terrible human costs. Estimates of the numbers killed vary. The Chinese Government has asserted that injuries exceeded 3,000 and that over 200 individuals, including 36 university students, were killed that night. Western sources, however, are skeptical of the official Chinese report and most frequently cite the toll as hundreds or even thousands killed.

The above excerpt is a masterclass in implying something without actually stating it, leaving plenty of room for plausible deniability. What unequivocally occurred within the Square, according to this summary, was that the PLA “stormed” it “with tanks.” When the army “crush[ed] the protests with terrible human costs,” was that also in the Square? And is “terrible human costs” referring to deaths? Why not just say “deaths”? Why put that in a separate sentence? Why not just say the soldiers stormed the square and killed a bunch of people? And regarding this next sentence about those who were killed, are we still talking about something that occurred in the Square? This is unclear, as these elements of the story are separated by punctuation and veiled in vagueness. As I have alluded to, it is intentionally unclear. 

A clear picture of what happened is not painted, because overtly admitting their cherished “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative turned out to be fictional would be profoundly embarrassing, damaging their credibility and weakening their anti-China narrative in the process. Instead, these bourgeois sources opt to incrementally chip away at the false “massacre” story with caveats and crafty language, leaving curious communist commentators like myself confused - wondering if said narrative even existed in the first place. Even the neo-fascist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has abandoned the traditional “massacre” narrative:

In the spring of 1989, Tiananmen Square in Beijing was the epicenter of massive pro-democracy demonstrations that spread to over 100 Chinese cities and involved over 100 million people. Unprecedented in scale in a communist country, these demonstrations brought keenly felt self-confidence, strength, and hope to the participants and the society at large. To hold on to its dictatorship, the Chinese Communist Party mobilized the military as well as the full force of the party and state machinery to crush the demonstrations on June 3-4, 1989. The CCP claimed that about 300 people were killed. Estimates by NGOs, news media, and foreign intelligence agencies range from 2,000 to 10,000 killed. 

The History Channel is the only mainstream Western source I could find that apparently didn’t get the memo, as they continue claiming government forces indiscriminately fired on crowds in the Square and continue employing the outdated and inaccurate term “Tiananmen Square massacre”:   

On June 4, 1989, […] Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. [...] In the United States, editorialists and members of Congress denounced the Tiananmen Square massacre and pressed for President George Bush to punish the Chinese government. A little more than three weeks later, the U.S. Congress voted to impose economic sanctions against the People’s Republic of China in response to the brutal violation of human rights.

The “massacre” fantasy - a harrowing tale of bloodthirsty PLA soldiers indiscriminately mowing down unarmed, peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square with machine gun fire - isn’t the only aspect of this history the West gets wrong. I recently spoke with Qiao Collective member Sun Feiyang, whose father attended some of the 1989 protests in China, about the complexities and contradictions of this tumultuous period (listen to our discussion here). In 2019, Feiyang wrote about the nature of the Tiananmen protests, including many unsavory details that are seldom discussed in the West. For instance, student protest leaders often exhibited an elitist contempt for workers, cordoning off protest areas so no one else could join. Student leader Wang Dan explained this sentiment concisely when he said, “The movement is not ready for worker participation because democracy must first be absorbed by the students and intellectuals before they can spread it to others."

Another protest leader, Chai Ling, yearned for a massacre of protesters by government forces: 

The students keep asking, “What should we do next? What can we accomplish?” I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?

When asked if she would remain in the Square, the self-described “chief commander” replied:

No, I won’t. Because my situation is different. My name is on the government’s hit list. I’m not going to let myself be destroyed by this government. I want to live.

Liu Xiaobo, who was considered a more “moderate” protest leader, believed China needed “300 years of colonialism” and later supported George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tiananmen protests also had roots in anti-Black racism and were supported by the CIA, who smuggled activists out of China through what Newsweek described as “an underground railroad run by an odd alliance of human-rights advocates, Western diplomats, businessmen, professional smugglers and the kings of the Hong Kong underworld.” 

Indeed, the Western capitalist orientation of the student protest leadership, including its desire for violent regime change, was on full display. As Becker noted, “The protest leaders erected a huge statue that resembled the United States’ Statue of Liberty in the middle of Tiananmen Square. They were signaling to the entire world that their political sympathies were with the capitalist countries and the United States in particular. They proclaimed that they would continue the protests until the government was ousted.” The lesser-known, elucidating details of this history could continue for pages, but I feel as though they are beyond the scope of this article. In lieu of a substantial tangent within this text, I’d recommend exploring Qiao Collective’s Tiananmen Protests Reading List.

Conclusion

The “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative is, in a sense, a classic example of anti-communist propaganda. It includes elaborate fabrication, exaggeration, omission, and double standards. It is repeated over and over again by solemn official sources to inspire an emotional and visceral reaction and thus shape the perspectives of millions. Important details are intentionally excluded, essentially erasing the political and historical context in order to bolster the Western bourgeois narrative revolving around the ostensibly “pro-democracy” nature of the protests. And what makes this particular atrocity myth even more persistent is the bitterness and resentment the Western capitalist class harbors towards China’s socialist project as it continues to advance, having defeated this aforementioned attempted counterrevolution 36 years ago.

In another sense, this famous fairy tale is unique. Unlike other anti-communist fables such as the “Holodomor” or the “Uyghur genocide,” both of which are fallacious yet persistent, the story of the blood-drenched Beijing square has been quietly abandoned by the Western press and its bourgeois backers. The original cartoonish sensationalism has been replaced with a measured, meticulously crafted rewrite that includes the same themes and accusations (authoritarianism, opposition to “democracy,” the crushing of dissent, state repression and brutality, etc.). Even after removing the central element (the fictional June 4th massacre), the narrative itself miraculously remains intact. China, we are told, is a totalitarian police state that viciously destroys the will of the people, regardless of whether its government committed unprovoked mass murder or defeated a violent, U.S.-backed, pro-capitalist rebellion.  

Whether it’s called a “massacre” or a “crackdown,” this conventional Western narrative is part of a larger effort to demonize the PRC and its overwhelmingly successful socialist path. However, the seemingly endless negative portrayals of China’s central government we are spoon-fed in the West are completely at odds with a simple truth: The vast majority of Chinese citizens actually support their government (approval ratings were even as high as 95.5 percent in a 2016 Harvard survey). This is because, throughout its history - from the record-breaking life expectancy increases under Mao, to the complete eradication of extreme poverty (accounting for 70 percent of global poverty reduction), to the unprecedented war against COVID-19, to the highly advanced public transportation system, to the crackdown on billionaires - the PRC’s communist government actually has served the interests of its citizens and continues to do so. And it is for this reason that I feel compelled to give Chinese voices the last word on this matter:

The trope of Chinese ignorance to the history of June 4th poses Westerners as the true keepers of Chinese history and the necessary deliverers of the Chinese people from communist authoritarianism. The pervasiveness of this chauvinistic mentality is apparent in the convergence between the neoconservative right and the anti-communist left in proclaiming platitudes of “solidarity with the Chinese people” against their government.

[…] 

Contrary to these infantilizing beliefs, many Chinese people—old and young—remember 1989. But the violence of June 4th is held in quiet remembrance in the Chinese psyche not as a desperate yearning for Western intervention or regime change, but as a tragic consequence of the contradictions of the reform and opening era, the legacies of the Cultural Revolution, and an overdetermined geopolitical context in which the U.S. bloc sought to exploit any and all opportunities to foreclose the persistence of actually-existing socialism. Lost in the West’s manipulative commemoration of the Tiananmen protests is the fact that two things exist at once: many Chinese people harbor pain and trauma over the bloodshed and remain supportive of the Communist Party of China and committed to China’s socialist modernization.