This is a collective statement on the war in Palestine by three groups related to Iran: Burn The Cage, Baloch Women’s Movement, Youth in Exile, and Osyan/Revolt*. IEC is reposting it here because Burn The Cage is a sister organization in Europe dedicated to freedom for political prisoners, and because our readers will find the content of the statement useful in the current moment of crisis in the Middle East.

Posted in Farsi on @maosyangarim, the statement was translated to English by revcom.us volunteers.

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“These are insects, mow them down like weeds!”
—Ayatollah Khamenei (about street protests in Iran)

“We are fighting human animals and will act accordingly!”
—Yoav Gallant, Israel's Minister of Defense (about the people of Gaza)

Israel must stop the genocidal operation against the people of Gaza! We will not tolerate the racist, fascist army of Israel calling the Palestinian people “animals” and ordering their mass murder, and will not tolerate the Western democracies, led by the U.S., putting their stamp of approval on this order. This is not racism as usual—it is a genocide committed with the support of one of the most powerful armies in the world.

No one should tolerate it! Silence in the face of the genocide of Palestinians will open the gates of hell not just for people in the Middle East but for people all over the world. Challenge the fascist Zionist ideology! We especially invite Israeli men and women who do not defend this blatant racism: Do not tolerate this, not only for the sake of the Jewish or the Palestinian people, but in the name of humanity and for the sake of humanity! Hitler's Holocaust against the Jews was one of the most monstrous crimes in human history. But there is only one correct response to it: This must never be allowed to happen again—not to the Jewish people, not to any people anywhere. But Zionist ideology preaches the opposite.

It is alarming, and instructive, that the majority of the anti-fascist movement in Israel has unified with the fascist army of Israel—and it shows how misguidedly relying on, and working within, the system will eventually lead to uniting with the system itself! If we do not stand against the terrible situation we are facing right now, we ourselves will turn into terrible people!

No More Demagoguery! The hired mouthpieces of these regimes are telling people that the issue of Israel-Palestine began with the October 7 operation by Hamas. But what about the 75 years of occupation? What about all the bombing, genocide, assault and imprisonment, the military occupation of Palestinian lands, and the creation of Jewish security and military settlements? The result of this 75-year crime is that the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have been confined in the world's largest prison, under siege by land, air and sea, in an ongoing massacre. This is the basic reality that governs that region, one we should all want to end.

The Jewish people, especially those in Israel, need to know that, after the Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel is the worst disaster that has happened to them. Of course, the suffering caused by the existence of this disastrous government is felt not only by them, and not only by the people of Palestine and of Israel. It is also the people of the world who suffer, and will continue to suffer, from the effects of the existence of such a government.

Do not deceive yourselves! When apartheid Israel was established, Hamas did not even exist. In 1948, during the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), when one million Palestinians were expelled from their lands, villages and homes by terror, assault, and mass murder, when even their olive and orange trees were wiped out, Hamas did not exist. Hamas is just a local criminal gang. By comparison, Israel, with its army and its security forces, is supported by—and in actuality is—a branch of the military and security apparatus of the world's largest power, U.S. imperialism. Hamas appropriated the historical struggle of an oppressed people, and rebranded it with fascist Islamism. Israel, with the cooperation of the U.S. and the U.S.’s puppet regimes in the Arab world (especially Saudi Arabia and Jordan), strengthened Hamas, killing and uprooting the secular and leftist forces of Palestine.

Hamas is an obstacle and not a solution!

Like the Islamic Republic, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are dark theocratic, patriarchal, misogynistic, racist and corrupt forces who have used Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people as “capital,” and a way to win permission to enter the club of reactionary governments in the region, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Using religious mythology, they twist and distort the nature of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine, trying to turn the secular and progressive struggle of the Palestinian people into a religious and racial fight between Muslims and Jews. Instead of fighting to liberate Palestine from the yoke of colonialism, they have diverted Palestinian youth into a reactionary Islamist movement that fights and dies for the “cause of God.” This is the same type of catastrophe that befell Iran during the anti-monarchy revolution of 1979. Hamas, with every intention of replicating what happened in Iran, named their recent reactionary operation after the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Israel's crimes have destroyed the lives of several generations of the Palestinian people. Not only does Hamas not represent the interests of the Palestinian people, it is a serious obstacle to their liberation. The coming to power of [Iran’s] Islamic Republic as a theocratic state and as godfather to other Islamist forces, has cohered Hamas and other religious forces in the region under the banner of “Axis of Resistance.” What they have in common—despite differences and similarities between the Israeli government and various Islamist currents such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic—are their crimes against the Palestinian and Israeli people. Both sides are the product of the same global capitalist system and its two outmoded, reactionary forms [imperialism and theocratic fundamentalism]. Instead of acting as an appendage of either one against the other, another path forward for the people must be opened up—from Iran and Afghanistan to Palestine and Turkey.

The history of Israel-Palestine state relations is one of those realities that are presented to the world in a partial or upside down way by the global capitalist-imperialist system, to influence people’s thinking and maintain its ideological hegemony. Both the formation of the state of Israel and all the crimes it has committed have been carried out with the cooperation and support of world powers led by the U.S.

The instrumentalist thinking that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a deadly poison. Influenced by this worldview, the global world order’s right and “left” wings are siding with either one side or the other in this war. This superficial and harmful way of thinking is promoted far and wide. We must fight this way of thinking, no matter what shape, form or disguise it may take. Using the same argument, based on their hostility to the Islamic Republic, a section of the population in Iran is defending Israel. But Israel is not only the enemy of the Islamic Republic, it is also the enemy of the Iranian people—from the Arab and Baloch to the Kurd and Turk [national minorities in Iran] and Persians, etc. If the Israeli army thinks it necessary, it will speak the language of bombing to the people of Iran or any other country, just as it does to the Palestinian people.

We are against this way of thinking. More than anything else, seeing and understanding reality is required to end these conditions. But under the domination of the ideologies and ways of thinking created by the capitalist system, [“enemy of my enemy is my friend”] has become a part of people's way of thinking. Time after time, around the world, actions based on this pragmatic paradigm—even by forces that once were progressive—have borne bitter fruit and only made the situation even worse. The result is always the same: the continued destruction of people's lives.

Again, Do Not Tolerate Deception or Self-Deception. Capitalism's “democracy” and “human rights” show their true nature in wars like this, when they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the criminals. The flood of messages of support and sympathy sent from the heads of state to Tel Aviv, like the U.S. deployment of battle-ready ships and arms in the region, are intended to make it more possible to support and guarantee the continuation of Israel's crimes in the service of their own interests. Demonstrations in support of Palestine are suppressed and declared illegal. Right away, the White House sent the message: “The U.S. government's support for Israel's security is firm and unwavering.” This steadfastness not only gives license to the Israeli government's limitless criminal massacre of the Palestinian people, but also gives the U.S. more leverage to advance its imperialist competition with the imperialists of China and Russia.

Let's Look at Every Important Political Event with Our Eyes Wide Open and a Global Scope to Our Vision! What happened in Israel-Palestine is actually a concentrated expression of the current state of the whole world today. The operation by Hamas and the start of Israel's war against the people of Gaza, is a global event that can suddenly spark even more massive wars. But this is not because the military operation of Hamas is “unprecedented”! It is because of the chaos that has engulfed the whole fabric of world society. Even the globalization of the Jina uprising was related to the situation that prevails in the world overall.

Everyone knows that the world system, which had been relatively stable despite destructive wars and rivalries, is now rapidly coming apart at the seams. An enormous explosive energy has accumulated within it, and the world cries out for change. This change could go in the terrible direction outlined by the Israeli Defense Minister: “kill the human animals!” Or it can go in another (far better and emancipating) direction as a result of our work and activity. We can totally snatch the initiative from the hands of the governments of the world—both the great and so-called “democratic” powers and the reactionary regimes like the Islamic Republic—and be the decisive factor that determines the future path of the world.

Seeing the scenes of this reactionary war makes our anger at this old world of oppression and exploitation even more molten, and our determination to get rid of it even more resolute. The greater frequency of wars and crimes does not normalize them for us. We, the people of the world, have a responsibility to confront this situation. The global capitalist system, including its continuous creation of war, poverty and oppression, exploitation and destruction of the environment, has turned the world into a minefield of strategic trip wires.

Let Us Be Vigilant and Not Pin Our Hopes on the Mirage of Changing the System in a Positive Direction!

No salvation for the people of the world and the whole of humanity can come about from within the world’s ruling system. The same explosive situations that continually erupt into crisis or war—in Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, Turkey, etc.—also present us with a rare opportunity to build a different future for our people all over the world. Everywhere in the world, we must create new political alignments/polarizations that are radically outside of the framework of each country’s ruling system, outside the worldwide system, and against the thoughts and ideologies that the ruling powers produce (and promote). We must create such a unified political environment that the ruling powers cannot marginalize or suffocate the truth that we speak or our efforts to open up a pathway that is fundamentally different from what prevails today.

We must open the path for the initiative and leadership of a conscious revolutionary force. We are fighting on the side of emancipation in this situation. We call on all those who hate/are fed up with this situation, those who are not willing to stand by and watch the suffering and misery of billions of people in the world, those who know, as we do, that people are not “animals”—not the Palestinian people, not the Jewish people, not people anywhere not the world—and people do not deserve punishment and revenge: this is our common fight against these conditions and those who created them.

Whether it is the proxy war of the nuclear imperialists in Ukraine, Israel's war against the Palestinian people, the Islamic Republic's war in Syria, the U.S.’s war in Iraq, Turkey's war in Kobani [Kurdish city in Syria], the Taliban's war against the people of Afghanistan… it is our people who are displaced and killed all over the world by the capitalist-imperialist system ... so that this system of oppression and exploitation can continue to exist. We must not and will not tolerate this!

October 15, 2023

Signed,

Burn the Cage/Free the Birds

Baloch Women’s Movement

Youth in Exile

Osyan/Revolt

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* Burn the Cage/Free the Birds is a movement in Europe to free Iran’s political prisoners. Baloch Women’s Movement: Baloch people are an oppressed ethnic group of nationality in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Youth in Exile are Iranian youth based in Europe. Osyan/Revolt is “the voice of women’s rebellion to express the determination, and to serve the struggle against the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Taliban.”