To our friends and comrades,

The American-Israeli alliance continues its futile attempts to strangle the resistance and its supporters, who remain steadfast in the struggle against Zionist land theft and occupation. The same war that the US-backed Zionist entity unleashed in October 2023 rages on, expanding to fuel facilities in Iran, revisiting the same bombed sites in the southern suburbs of Beirut, and returning to the skies over Gaza. 

After decades of planning and infiltration, the US has surrounded the Islamic resistance with hand-picked collaborators, crony states, and hundreds of military outposts. They are closing in from the land, sky, and sea. And yet, even with the endless military budget that they hoard from the hands of the hungry, they are still unable to achieve what they sought out to do. 

Victory will come to the righteous, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, over the South, over Gaza, and over Tehran.

The US has once again dug its own grave, stumbling into a war it cannot win in order to loot and accumulate oil and capital. While the US-Zionist media spins this bloodthirsty attack on empty promises of Iranian liberation, US politicians have explicitly stated their intentions to steal fuel, as they have with Venezuela. 

In a recent televised interview with Fox News, a swine-shaped man named Lindsey Graham told the Americans: “When this regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going to make a ton of money.” He failed to mention, however, the exorbitant cost of this military assault on Iran, and the chokehold that the Strait of Hormuz has on the global economy, the same global economy out of which US-imposed sanctions forced Iran. 

As it stands today, a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas flows have halted, Saudi Arabia announced temporary closure of one of its largest oil facilities, and QatarEnergy has halted liquefied natural gas production, sending gas prices soaring in Europe and Asia. Global leaders are faced with a simple reality: Fealty to “Israel” brings domestic and global crisis. After years of genocide in Gaza, the cost of “business as usual” has finally become too high.

It is not only militants who are under attack by the Zionists, not only civilians who bear the brunt of their brutality, but the very essence of resistance is being targeted. The Zionist entity is threatening the fabric of our society, the ideas that bind us together, our hope for liberation. By repeating the same violence over and over again, they want us to grow accustomed to brutality, to the numbers of martyrs increasing every day, to the footage of buildings collapsing under US bombs. 

But we refuse to get used to it. While our friends in the region build emergency networks to support those who stand in the face of the tanks, it is time for those on the other side to act. What will it take to halt the currency of empire? What will it take to bring the Zionist project to its knees?

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Honor the martyrs of Lebanon

The following dispatch was written by a W.A.W.O.G. member living in Beirut, which is under indiscriminate bombardment from Israeli forces. Israel has displaced nearly a million people in Lebanon in the last week, killed hundreds, and promises its evil escalation against the Lebanese people is only beginning. 

Last night, I watched the sunset at Ramlet el-Bayda, a public beach on the southern end of Beirut’s promenade. From the top of the cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, you can see the coastline wrap south, toward Palestine. 

The air was thick and smelled like detonation powder; smoke from the Zionist bombings of Dahieh drifted over the water. On the sidewalk and on the beach, displaced people set up tents, arranged plastic chairs around small fires, and smoked hookah. I snapped a photo of the distant shoreline. I left. 

Several hours later, an Israeli drone bombed the beach and the boardwalk, killing eight people and injuring more than 30 others. Limbs strewn across the pavement and blood soaking into the sand. 

It was unbelievable. It was entirely believable. 

The capacity of this enemy to turn the softest scene into horror, to find and to ravage these inexhaustible displays of life. 

After the massacre, the army identified an unexploded missile on the beach and cordoned off the area. People with nowhere to go set out in search of some other place to spend the night. Sitting on my bed, phone in hand, watching the videos of the aftermath, I found myself wishing to turn back time, to stand at the top of the cliff at Ramlet el-Bayda at twilight, before the massacre, before the night. 

I used to look forward to the deep hours when Beirut’s congested streets emptied and the humidity and exhaust dissipated from the air. People’s faces seemed to soften; it was a reprieve. But these nights of war are terror. These massacres, preceded by the roar of warplanes and the bleat of drones, announced by the shudder of bombardment, are terror. 

But I am learning to cross them, as one crosses a tightrope or a bed of broken glass.

March for Quds Day

Today is a day for imperialist flag-burning. Or at least it should be. 

On August 7, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the last Friday of Ramadan as International Quds Day, calling on Muslims worldwide to unite in solidarity with Palestinians and in opposition to Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem (Al Quds)—a counter to the Zionist state’s “Jerusalem Day,” which commemorates the ‘reunification’ of East and West Jerusalem following the Six-Day War. 

The event has evolved to become an international demonstration against Israel, Zionism, U.S. imperialism, and state collaboration; and Israeli/American flag-burning became a Quds Day tradition.

The United Kingdom banned the annual Quds Day march in London this year over concerns over “public disorder” and threats from the Iranian regime. Germany implemented a similar ban in 2021 citing concerns over pro-resistance symbols and messaging. But our enemies do not decide when and how we protest. 

• March alongside comrades in NYC’s Quds Day rally, Friday March 13, at 3:30pm at Times Square.  

• Join your comrades in New York City at 12pm Saturday March 14 to rally to free Leqaa Kordia, the last Columbia University protester who remains in ICE captivity. Leqaa has been held by ICE for a year. 

• Comrades in Toronto will rally outside the US Consulate at 360 University Ave. on Saturday, March 14 at 3pm.

Donate

The absence of mutual aid fundraisers for Iranians affected by relentless bombardment from the US-Israeli Zionist alliance is due to severe Western sanctions on Iran. Even family remittances from the US and Europe to Iran require fluency of a complex web of regulations in order to avoid the criminalization of financial transactions. Below are  several mutual aid efforts for displaced persons in Lebanon as well as an official fundraiser for the Iranian Red Crescent. 

• Donate today to help the Iranian Red Crescent reach 200,000 people with life-saving assistance. 

• Support the Lebanon Solidarity Collective’s mutual aid efforts. 

• Donate to Workers for Palestine’s Lebanon Emergency Relief fundraiser.

• Help Lebanese farmers fight for land sovereignty. 

• Feed people displaced to central Beirut. 

• Support trusted mutual aid efforts by venmoing @shraydeh or @lsaab.

• Help Lebanon’s national first responders—The Civil Defense—with essential and life-saving supplies.

• DM @khabarkeslan on Instagram for donation efforts in Lebanon. See their post. 

Philly, join our town hall March 31

Philly WAWOG’s fifth community town hall and fundraiser for Gaza will be held Tuesday, March 31 from 6-9 at Calvary Center (801 S 48th St), organized in collaboration with Black Alliance for Peace, Philly Muslim Freedom Fund, and Philly Educators for Palestine. RSVP here.

We leave you with the words of Saha Bechara, Lebanese National Resistance fighter, from this intimate interview. 

I am someone born into this world who opened her eyes, lived, and — like most of her generation— lived through the civil war and the continuous Israeli invasions and occupations. I am a person who seeks to preserve at least her own humanity, and who is capable of maintaining it by her sacrifices for the others, whom herself and them are one.