To those who refuse to look away,

The U.S.-Zionist imperialist alliance has yet again instigated an all out war. Eight months ago, U.S.-backed Zionist assaults hit Iranian nuclear facilities under the disingenuous rhetoric of “preemptive strikes” while both sides engaged in so-called negotiations. This past weekend, the alliance assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, initiating the most violent phase yet of its war on Iran. By Thursday, the civilian death toll in Iran had surpassed 1,000, including 168 children slaughtered by the U.S. bombing of a girls’ school in the southern city of Minab. 

In just six days, following the same annihilatory playbook developed in Gaza, the enemy severely damaged fourteen Iranian medical and pharmaceutical centers, including the Blood Transfusion Center in West Azerbaijan Province, Taleghani Hospital in Urmia, Ameneh Infant Home, Welfare Center for the Disabled in Tehran, and the Shahid Motahari Burn and Accident Hospital. 

The words we wrote in a bulletin back in 2025 ring more true than ever: “Neither preemptive strike nor self-defense are appropriate rhetorics for the present aggression on Iran. The Zionist entity’s military expansionism is predicated on discriminatory characterizations of Iranian barbarism peddled by the media, even though it is the entity, not Iran, that has colonized and occupied Arab lands and brutalized Arab people for generations. Anti-imperialist resistance movements are fighting not only for the future of a liberated Palestine, but for the future of humanity. To be a writer against the war on Gaza is to be a writer against the war on Iran.”

Today, we reiterate the people’s opposition to any war on Iran, including the economic sanctions that manufacture scarcity of medicine, technology, and materials. We reject the victim-blaming logic of preemption and remind our readers that Iran is a pillar of regional defiance to foreign hegemony. A weakened Iran is a massive blow to the anti-imperialist resistance and the financial, material, and military support that it relies on to defend against Zionist expansion.

The Gulf Arab states long ago forfeited any claim to pan-Arab solidarity. Retaliatory IRGC drones and missiles have rained down on U.S. military bases and intelligence assets in Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, revealing how ingratiated these countries are with the imperial project destabilizing the region. Meanwhile, warmongering calls to arm Kurdish rebels in Iran hearken back to America’s long history of fomenting civil war and state failure. The twentieth century is riddled with damning demonstrations of the devastating consequences of America undermining the  self-determining power and prosperity of sovereign nations with its blood-soaked dollar and deadly weaponry. Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua... The list goes on. 

Two and a half years of ceaseless genocide in Gaza have eliminated any pretence of an international rules-based order. Security Council resolutions failed, the Special Rapporteur for Palestine’s access to global financial systems was revoked, and piecemeal negotiations to stem the loss of Palestinian life and land have proven entirely futile. 

What we are left with is a stark vision for the future, one where the brutal imperial alliance of the United States-Israel continues to claim a monopoly on violence and victimhood.

War is not inevitable and must be opposed wherever it is stoked. We refuse to allow imperial powers to carve up the world to feed their insatiable appetite for resource extraction, global hegemony, and ideological warfare. 

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Hands off Lebanon

The Zionists on Thursday issued a warning to the people of Beirut’s southern suburbs to evacuate. Last night, the Zionists bombed an empty hotel in a Christian area to sow further resentment and fuel the flames of sectarianism, and issued a sweeping evacuation order for the tens of thousands of people living south of the Litani river. The drones overhead are ceaseless and low-flying; the bombing is intensifying and Zionist troops have entered sovereign Lebanese territory. We have seen this all happen before in Gaza. 

The Zionist entity has no right to issue evacuation orders anywhere in Lebanon or to mischaracterize Hezbollah’s rocket fire as the rupturing event of a ceasefire that Israel has already violated 15,000 times. Since Saturday, Zionist air strikes have targeted villages in Lebanon’s south as well as residential areas of Beirut, displacing 83,000 people, martyring 127 people including 7 children, and wounding 638 others. Despite advanced technology and intelligence that ensure the Zionist entity can strike with precision—as the IRGC has done with its careful targeting of American assets—the U.S.-Zionist alliance kills civilians again and again. This is no mistake. The window for plausible deniability lapsed many years, and many hospitals, schools, playgrounds, and libraries ago. 

This is what Israel is; this is what it does. It sows division and it terrorizes people. It destroys land. It is the enemy of life. It is incumbent on everyone in the solidarity movement to rise to the occasion — to organize, to protest, to fight. This new hell distracts from the awful plight of our people in Gaza, homeless for more than two years in tattered beach tents. 

This movement cannot die because this enemy cannot win.

Death to the enemies of life

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Read with us

Recent essays

• The dry and the wet burn together — London Review of Books

• It’s not complicated — The Key, Palestine Literature Festival

• America, Israel, and the New Era of Colonialism — Al-Rifaq

• Mass Expulsion in Lebanon as Israel Expands War: “We Don’t Know Where to Go” — Drop Site News

• “The condition for freedom is for the Egyptian masses to take to the streets” — Transnational Institute

Books

• Memoir: Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi

• Novel: The Lord by Soraya Antonius

• Memoir: Let the Poets Govern by Camoghne Felix

• Novel: Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury

• Essays: Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson ft exchanges with an Outlaw 

• Analysis: The Sword and the Neck by Yanis Iqbal

• Essays: Blood in My Eye by George Jackson

• Poetry: The Hungering Years by Summer Farah

We leave you with the words of Dr. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rantisi from his 2003 essay reflecting on resistance and the American invasion of Iraq

At a time when the Americans have deprived us of our security in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Chechnya, Kashmir, and other places, where America strikes us either directly or supports our enemies with all forms of logistic assistance so that they strike us on its behalf, we must respond to this aggression by besieging America with resistance. We must not allow those who have deprived us of our security to remain safe. Whenever the Americans have entered a Muslim country, their central goal has been to carry out some form of aggression. They are the ones who are experimenting with the latest weapons of mass destruction devised by the evil American mentality to kill us. They are the ones who continue to incite regimes loyal to them to persecute and eliminate our Muslim youth. They are the ones who fight Muslims, extinguishing every morsel of their livelihood. They are the ones who plunder the wealth of Muslims. They are the ones who go to excess in humiliating Muslims, even on television, as happened in the Nazi-Zionist detention facility at Guantanamo, and as is happening today in Iraq. We cannot enumerate all the forms of American aggression against Muslims. It suffices that American propaganda has made every Muslim a terrorist pursued, wanted in every corner of the world.