Israel’s 12-days of targeted airstrikes in Iran — a defensive war to prevent a new holocaust — dealt big blows to the reactionary regime’s capacity to manufacture and launch nuclear weapons. For years the Iranian regime has planned for the destruction of Israel, which it calls the “Zionist entity” and a “cancerous tumor” that needs to be removed from the region.
At the same time, Tehran’s deadly missile strikes on civilian centers in Israel show that the longer-term threat remains. Tehran insists it will rebuild its capacity to enrich uranium and continue preparing to eradicate Israel.
Israeli forces systematically destroyed key sites used for Tehran’s nuclear weapons program along with two-thirds of its ballistic missile launchers, arms factories and other military targets. The strikes also hit headquarters of Iran’s repressive forces and killed top Iranian military commanders, as well as scientists directly involved in the regime’s nuclear program.
After Israel had devastated Iran’s air defenses — controlling the country’s skies — President Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to attack three key sites. Those June 21 attacks were aimed at bolstering U.S. imperialist domination of the Middle East, not defending the survival of the Jewish people. U.S. planes dropped 14 30,000 pound “bunker-buster bombs” on nuclear sites at Fordow, deep underneath a mountain, and Natanz, as well as 30 Tomahawk missiles fired on Isfahan.
Trump then used this display of U.S. imperialist military might to demand that Tehran and Israel agree to a ceasefire, which began June 24. When Israel sent planes to respond to Tehran’s ceasefire violations within the first few hours of it taking effect, Trump warned Netanyahu, “Do not drop those bombs.” Netanyahu ordered the destruction of one more radar site in Iran, but then recalled the planes.
Nonetheless, “if someone in Iran thinks they can rebuild the nuclear program, we will act in the same way,” the Israeli prime minister emphasized in a nationwide broadcast June 24. “I repeat: Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”
Tehran targeted civilians in Israel
Tehran had launched some 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel, targeting population centers such as Haifa — a mixed Jewish-Arab city — and Tel Aviv. While Israel shot down all but a handful of the drones and nearly 90% of the missiles, over 20 missiles struck apartment buildings, a cancer research center, a hospital, universities, a day care center and other civilian targets.
Among the 28 dead and more than 2,835 injured in Israel by the Iranian attacks — overwhelmingly civilians — were four Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Muslim-majority city of Tamra. Many Israelis were appalled when a racist Israeli posted a video singing “May your village burn.” Thousands of Israelis — including Orthodox and secular Jews, Druze, Christians from surrounding towns — filled the streets of Tamra to show solidarity with the Muslim victims during the three-day mourning period. Some 20% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinians and other Arabs.
Tehran has long promoted the fiction that its nuclear program is for generating electricity. But according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, by the start of the war Tehran had enriched some 880 pounds of uranium to 60%, for which there is no civilian use. It would just take a couple of weeks to enrich that to the 90% needed to make nine nuclear warheads more powerful than those Washington dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.
It’s still not known if Tehran managed to salvage that stash of potential nuclear bomb fuel.
The Iranian government claims that some 600 people were killed and 5,000 injured in the Israeli strikes, in a country of some 90 million. Whatever the accuracy of these figures, the casualties were largely from members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the army, the paramilitary Basij and others directly involved in the repressive apparatus and Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Workers in Iran oppose the regime
The Iranian regime tried to use the Israeli strikes to convince working people to rally round the government. It organized some large rallies.
But millions of workers and farmers in Iran hate the regime for its trampling on democratic rights and the rights of women and its discrimination against oppressed nationalities. They’re fed up with its use of workers as cannon fodder to expand the Iranian rulers’ power across the region and destroy Israel and the Jews.
“We believe that to stop this war, the causes that led to it must be dismantled,” said a statement by Council for Organizing Protests of Contract Oil Workers, which was also signed by the Council for Organizing Nurses’ Protests as well as retiree and women’s rights groups.
While opposing the Israeli attacks, the statement said that the central problem is the reactionary regime and its nuclear weapons program. “We the people do not want weapons of mass destruction or nuclear weapons. We consider all nuclear activity by the Islamic Republic to be dangerous and against the interests of the people.”
Working people “will not allow the regime to use war as a pretext to suppress our demands, block our progress, intensify arrests and repression, and expand executions and killings, under accusations like ‘Israeli spy,’” the statement said.
The Iranian government says that it has arrested some 700 people accused of supporting Israel. This includes at least 54 Arabs in Khuzestan province. Human Rights activists say that the government executed 30 prisoners during the 12-day war.
Despite the war, political prisoners in dozens of prisons held their 74th consecutive weekly Tuesday hunger strike against the death penalty, noting that “despite the war and critical conditions in recent days, the execution machine continues its killing spree.”
On June 22, retirees in Rasht, Gilan province, held their weekly protest for an increase in pensions to match inflation and for free health care. “Shout, shout against all this oppression!” they chanted. “Cry out for your rights.”