To those who can’t sleep,

When the Israeli attacks on Iranian military and civilian targets began on Friday, warmongering media outlets like the New York Times rushed to advance the West’s preferred narrative of the “preemptive strike.” This convenient logic — if you strike to remove a threat before it materializes, what will materialize is a response that looks like a threat — has time and time again distorted the realities of imperial aggression. As always, post-facto justification and proactive consent-building work in tandem: The aggressor becomes the victim, while a nation of 90 million people is vilified.

We reject any and all narratives that absolve the U.S.-Zionist alliance of its responsibility for the current war of aggression on Iran, which threatens to displace millions and plunge the country into Western-backed proxy conflict. We count in this camp the writers, editors, and producers of English-language media, who have long served as handmaidens to the forces of destruction in West Asia. 

In Iraq, the grammar of preemption at the onset of the so-called War on Terror enabled hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. A multinational alliance of imperial powers committed billions in resources to George W. Bush’s “preemptive” hunt for weapons of mass destruction which, of course, never existed. Western media dutifully sought to convince the world of the justness and necessity of years of occupation, bombing, and forced economic dependency. For these crimes and cover-ups, there has never been any justice or reparation. The last week has shown that the media will not hesitate to corroborate imperial lies again, unless, with all our might, we refute them.

The present conjuncture reverberates with the effects of regime change. “Israel” is using Iraqi airspace to bomb Iranian cities, attacking not only economic infrastructure but also high-rises sheltering families. In Arab nations like Jordan and Syria, forced through decades of imperialism into conditions of dependency and de-development, a network of forward bases and corporate resource theft work together to advance Western objectives. Iran is a pillar of regional defiance to foreign hegemony, and its withering would be catastrophic for the fate of anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist resistance. 

Many of the twentieth century’s coups and invasions by American forces or the CIA were launched “preemptively”; this framing is intended to efface years of groundwork, espionage, and paramilitarization that always precede the ‘hot’ confrontation. It therefore bears repeating that Israel is not a victim and not acting in self-defense, but in defense of a myth. Almost two years of mass extermination in Gaza has opened many people’s eyes to the truth. The entity that is presently engaged in unprovoked warfare on multiple fronts — in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran — is the real destabilizing force in the region, and it must be stopped now. 

The United States has placed extreme sanctions on Iran for decades, severely diminishing the quality of life for everyday Iranians and making basic societal necessities — from medicine to construction materials — exorbitantly expensive. A primary rationale for these sanctions is the unproven threat of Iran’s nuclear development. As with Iraq, racialized anxieties about phantom weapons in the hands of “irrational actors” are fomented by U.S. state actors and the media class to manufacture consent for war. Iran has been a ratified signatory of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty since 1970 and, until Trump withdrew from the Nuclear agreement in 2018, IAEA inspectors routinely confirmed that its uranium enrichment capabilities were not weapons-grade. In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus, a joint U.S.-Israeli creation, disrupted Iranian centrifuges, and in 2020, Israeli intelligence infiltrated safes and hardware in Tehran to steal confidential data on Iran’s energy capabilities. Since then, the Zionist entity has been linked to multiple explosions, cyber attacks, and poisonings targeting Iranian state facilities and personnel.

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.

Take up the demand for an arms embargo

The only way to stop the genocide and support endogenous resistance to Zionism and imperialism — whether in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, or Yemen — is to halt the flow of weapons to Israel. Ceasefire negotiations have proven to be brief theatrical interludes between bombardment and slaughter. International humanitarian law is a chimera. But actionists in Britain, Europe, South America, and North America have directly targeted Elbit plants, while activists have used diverse means of pressuring their governments to delink from the supply chain of death. Italy, Spain, Colombia, Belgium, Canada, Japan, and the Netherlands have ceased all arms trading with Israel, and dozens of governmental and civilian bodies across the world have called for an arms embargo. Recently in Morocco, dockworkers blocked shipments headed to Israel, delaying military equipment undoubtedly intended for use on Iran.

Death merchants are having second thoughts about the genocide, despite a surge in profits. Yesterday was the first day of the International Paris Air Show, a military tech meet-and-greet disguised as family entertainment. Elbit arrived to find that their prize products — the missiles that have been killing Palestinians for decades — had been cordoned from view by office space partitions. Elbit hysterically claimed that these “walls” are “aimed at silencing Israeli innovation” and, true to the Zionist love of word-twisting, quoted Exodus 1:12: “The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread.” Yet life is stronger than death. PAL Action in the UK is committed to outpacing Elbit at every turn — destroying their factories, blockading their plants, smashing their banks.

In Toronto, our local chapter — as part of the No Arms in the Arts coalition — has spent more than a year attacking Canada’s Scotiabank on the cultural front. Scotiabank, formerly the largest foreign investor in Elbit Systems, has divested more than $300 million in shares due to this sustained, strategic pressure campaign. A massive boycott forced the Giller Prize to end a 20-year partnership with Scotiabank. A creative counter-programming effort, the No Arms In the Arts Festival, has drawn energy away from the Scotiabank-sponsored Hot Docs festival and toward political education and consciousness-raising. (The second iteration of this festival took place this past weekend. For transcripts and video footage, as well as information on upcoming events, visit noarmsinthearts.com or email toronto@wawog.com.) But in the first quarter of 2025, Scotiabank quietly increased its number of shares by 25% — nowhere near its original stake, but enough to remind us there is more work to be done.

In New York, the liberal free-speech organization PEN America demonstrated the effectiveness of our boycott by releasing a statement calling “on the U.S. government to immediately cease all transfers of offensive weapons to Israel.” This is a significant, if belated, win for the movement. We hope decision-makers at the New York Times are paying attention: The editorial board, rather than handwringing over the spectre of a Muslim mayor and using misdirection and pseudoscience to project the shadows of antisemitism on the wall, could be using their sizable influence to call for an arms embargo. Until then, you know what to do.

In the face of totalizing destruction, our task is to resist paralysis, be creative, and act now.

Speak up for Palestinian journalists

Journalist Moamen Abu al-Auf was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday, June 10, while he was covering a humanitarian mission with ambulance crews. He and the same crew were present at the scene of the al-Jarjawi massacre when a six-year-old girl walked through fire to become an international symbol of Israel’s holocaust. Al-Auf is the 227th media worker martyred in Gaza over the past 20 months. 

“He died an honorable death,” Moamen’s mother said as she bid him farewell, “and as for [the Zionists] they will die too, but […] they will die like worthless scum.”

Israel also continues to target medical workers. Three paramedics, Hussein Abu Faisal, Wael Al-Attar and Bara Afana, were killed in the same June 10 airstrike while attempting to rescue the families wounded in a Zionist airstrike on a Gaza City home.

Meanwhile, the Zionist entity openly threatened the chief spokesperson for the Civil Defense Ministry, Mahmoud Basal, for the crime of “making false statements to the international media,” once again employing the tactic of labeling truth-tellers as Hamas – effectively signing his death warrant.

Donate — the least you can do

The Sameer Project is a Palestinian-led grassroots aid initiative that provides emergency shelter and supplies to families in Gaza. On June 15, the camp manager and main coordinator of distribution, Mosab Emad Ali, was killed by the annihilatory Zionist forces. In a statement, the Sameer Project mourned his loss and vowed to continue serving their people. Please support their mission in his honor.

Read with us

Here are several threads analyzing the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces at work in this world-historical moment, authored by scholars and activists we recommend following on “X”:   

• Laleh Khalili, Iranian scholar and author of Sinews of War and Trade

• Helyeh Doutaghi, Iranian legal scholar

• Tamim al-Barghouti, Palestinian-Egyptian poet and pundit

• Amal Saad, Lebanese political analyst 

• Ibn Safad, Palestinian activist

We leave you with the words of Tamim al-Barghouti, from his poem “The Ant,” translated by Radwa Ashour:

Nothing radical
The cloud knows
Exactly how much rain caused the deluge—
So it’s the calmest one on the scene

Being a compassionate cloud
It sends message after message
To those who most doubt salvation
To elderly women whose lives depend on news reports
To infants born with clenched fists—
Accused of terrorism

The cloud forms itself
Into white words
On a blue slate:
People,
My people,
You shall overcome.