On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and the rulers in Iran announced they had won a huge victory. Thousands of Tehran-backed Hamas thugs crossed the Gaza border into Israel, killed 1,200 people — mostly civilians; wounded thousands; raped and mutilated dozens of women; and kidnapped 250 hostages to Gaza.
It was the largest anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust. The next day, Hezbollah — organized, financed and armed by Tehran — began daily missile and drone attacks on northern Israel “in solidarity” with Hamas. Other members of Tehran’s so-called axis of resistance, from the Houthis in Yemen to militias in Iraq, stepped up attacks on Israel.
Middle-class and student apologists for Hamas around the world rushed into the streets, calling the massacre “wonderful news.”
The Iranian rulers were convinced they had sabotaged the continuing normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between Israel and Muslim governments — known as the “Abraham Accords” — and that this had paved the way for more pogroms until they destroyed Israel and expelled or killed all the Jews.
That is what the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means. Free from Jews.
But Tehran and Hamas underestimated the Israeli government and people. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a capitalist politician who relies on U.S. imperialism’s aid. But he understood that there could be a world without Israel, including if he went along with the Biden administration’s demands to end the war with Hamas and Hezbollah still intact and Tehran continuing its drive to get nuclear weapons.
Now, 15 months later, the reactionary bourgeois regime in Iran is weaker than ever; Hezbollah, the most powerful of Tehran’s proxy forces, is in shambles; Hamas is on life support, as Israeli forces drive against its remaining hideouts; and the brutal Assad dictatorship in Syria, which provided Tehran with the main land route for its arm shipments to Hezbollah, is no more.
High morale of workers in Israel
Tehran and Hamas didn’t take into account the fighting spirit and morale of Israeli working people, Jews and Arabs alike, who know they are fighting for their very existence. The fact that Hamas killed not only Jews, but dozens of Arab citizens of Israel as well as immigrant workers had a big impact. As did its horrendous crimes of rape and mutilation. It punctured illusions that Hamas in some distorted way represents the national aspirations of the Palestinian people instead of being the biggest obstacle to those aspirations.
Although still a relatively small number, more Arab citizens of Israel have joined the Israel Defense Forces since Oct. 7. “A lot of Israeli-Arabs, young people, saw what I did and decided to follow through,” IDF soldier Yahya Mahamid, a Muslim Arab, told the media in December. “As an Israeli soldier, I wait for the proud Palestinian leader that loves their people more than they hate Israel to come. I still have yet to see another leader like that.”
Tehran did not take into account the growing opposition by working people inside Iran — Persian, Azerbaijani, Arab, Baluch, Kurds — to the regime’s military adventures abroad. That’s the biggest brake on the Iranian rulers’ drive to extend their reactionary influence in the region.
Hamas expanded its building of tunnels in Gaza in 2007, after narrowly winning elections there and then smashing its main rival in bloody fighting. By 2023 more than 350 miles of tunnels rivaled the length of the New York City subways. But with utter disdain for the lives of working people in Gaza, the group did not build a single bomb shelter for civilians.
Hamas put its command posts, weapons storage and factories underneath hospitals, schools, U.N. buildings, mosques and people’s homes.
Hamas considered this a “win-win” situation. It afforded protection from Israeli attacks, since Israeli policy is to try to avoid killing civilians. If Israel does attack, the more civilians that die the better, Hamas believes. That provides more martyrs to win public sympathy from capitalist regimes around the world and increase pressure on Israel.
Oct. 7 could have been an even worse massacre. Some IDF, Shin Bet and Mossad officials are part of the “never Netanyahu” current in Israeli bourgeois politics. They see the only way forward as reliance on U.S. imperialism and ignored growing evidence over more than a year that Hamas was planning a big operation.
They kept that information from Netanyahu, worried he would organize a full-blown response that Washington would view as a threat to the stability it demands for its own economic and political interests in the region. “Democratic” imperialism is concerned about the profits of the U.S. ruling class, not the lives of Jews.
Even on Oct. 7, as reports came in that Hamas was moving to breach the border, officials decided not to wake up Netanyahu. He only learned about it after the attack had begun.
In the absence of immediate action by the Israel Defense Forces, ordinary Israelis headed to the front lines to rescue people and keep Hamas from advancing further. Volunteers included reservists, former soldiers and some civilians, both Jews and Bedouins.
International anti-Israel propaganda
Tehran and Hamas have created an international propaganda machine, especially on college campuses — composed of Stalinists, anarchists and other middle-class leftists, along with fellow Islamists. Since 2005 they have been calling for “boycott, divestment, sanctions” on Israel — spreading the lie that Israel is a “white supremacist” and “apartheid state.” It kicked into overdrive Oct. 7, organizing actions across the globe.
“You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front and have begun an honorable struggle,” Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a May 2024 message to students in the U.S. who had joined anti-Israel protests. This from the head of a regime notorious for its use of the death penalty against political opponents, and its oppression of women, national minorities and union fighters.
The liberal bourgeois press in the U.S. and worldwide help spread Hamas propaganda. A study by the U.K.-based Henry Jackson Society of 1,378 articles by major media found that 98% of the press cite fatality figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry as fact, even though those figures have been shown to be manipulated, such as listing men as women, and adults as children. A mere 5% cited figures provided by Israel, and half the time they questioned Israeli figures.
Stopping Tehran from getting nukes
Meanwhile, in the face of its growing setbacks from Syria to Lebanon, Tehran has been stepping up its production of material necessary to build a nuclear weapon. According to the Jerusalem Post, Tehran is “closer than ever to having enough highly enriched uranium” to make several bombs.
With Tehran’s allies in disarray and its air defense system largely destroyed, Israeli forces have an opportunity to prevent Tehran from possessing nuclear weapons. But time is of the essence.
Working people need to defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews without giving any political support to the capitalist government there. The workings of capitalist property relations in Israel weaken the fight against Jew-hatred, from Netanyahu’s portrayal of U.S. imperialism as a defender of “civilization,” despite its history of bloody wars of conquest, to discrimination faced by Arab citizens of Israel, as well as the Israeli rulers’ treatment of immigrant workers.
Israeli blows to Tehran, Hamas and other proxy forces open a window for working people in the region and around the world whatever their religion or national origins to come together to defend their common class interests on the road to taking political power out of the hands of the capitalist class.