Useful enemies: On anti-imperialism and Israel’s war on Iran

First published at Midnight Sun.

The US-backed Israeli war of aggression against Iran was only the latest episode in a series of military invasions that Israel has carried out following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. The real goal of this military aggression was not simply to remove a so-called nuclear threat, as suggested by Israeli officials, but to consolidate Israel’s military superiority in the Middle East and, by proxy, American influence in the region. In pursuit of this goal, Israel has systematically sought to undermine actual or potential opposition to Israeli-American strategic interests in the region: attempting to decapitate and devastate Hamas in Gaza, defang Lebanese Hizbollah, and significantly damage military infrastructure in Syria and Iran, establishing extensive control of air space in these countries. Nevertheless, echoing Western intelligence agencies, even Israeli officials have acknowledged that some of Iran’s enriched uranium has survived the US-Israeli strikes. And although Israel claims to have only hit military targets in Iran, its attacks have killed hundreds of Iranian civilians, including children. The Iranian side retaliated by launching several rounds of missile and drone attacks, but the impact of these attacks was far less severe, with significantly fewer casualties and minimal infrastructure damage.

Against this backdrop, a principled leftist stance must begin by firmly condemning the US and Israel for launching an imperialist war on Iran. At the same time, opposition to American and Israeli imperialist aggression should not mean that we endorse the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI)’s authoritarian, clerical-military rule, with its brutal suppression of dissent. In staking out the boundaries of our anti-imperialism, we must be careful not to promote the IRI’s narrative and propaganda about this war, which contains significant distortions. 

Archenemies or useful enemies?

One of the most commonplace among those distortions, which has unfortunately been endorsed by influential voices on the left, is the idea that Israel is pursuing a “regime-change agenda.” This analysis follows a conventional explanatory framework that portrays imperialism as a force that has an irreconcilable antagonism with its opponents, and whenever it makes a military attempt against them, regardless of scale, it is pursuing a regime change. The IRI’s official line echoes this view.

The fact is that, far from an unbridgeable divide and zero-sum confrontation, American and Israeli relations with the IRI have amounted to a calculated, carefully measured hostility in which all parties gain something, albeit through compromises of unequal proportions. Despite seemingly unwavering enmity toward the US and Israel in its official rhetoric and gesturing, the IRI has engaged, often secretly, with the US and Israel when that has suited its interests. From clandestine US arms sales to Iran during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war (the Iran-Contra affair), to a string of cooperations in Afghanistan and Iraq throughout the 2000s and 2010s, to secret direct negotiations between the IRI and the US in 2013, to recent ostensibly indirect talks between the US special envoy to the Middle East and Iran’s foreign minister, the pattern is unmistakable. There are reports that even during the recent war of aggression, the Trump administration gave Iran advance notice regarding the American strikes on the Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz nuclear sites, leading to evacuations that left most of the sites’ enriched uranium secured. Contradicting Trump’s claim that the US strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities, a leaked early US intelligence report and a later US assessment both suggest the damage caused by US bombs may have set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months.

For the IRI, survival has always been the top priority in any engagement with the Western imperialist side. The US, for its part, has consistently worked to contain the IRI while carefully calibrating pressure to prevent it from becoming a satellite state of China and Russia or, previously, the Soviet Union. As a sober analysis by the scholar Fouâd Oveisy explains, the Biden and Trump administrations have both seen Iran’s nuclear ambitions as inherently intertwined with the Iranian state’s ties to China. The Biden administration prioritized keeping Iran from aligning too closely with China, while the Trump administration has shown more openness to a multipolar Middle East and has focused instead on curbing Iran’s ability to leverage nuclear capabilities or regional instability for geopolitical gains. Israel, in turn, seeks to contain the IRI’s threat and turn it to a weak and manageable enemy rather than necessarily toppling it — an approach similar to those the Israeli state took in relation to other regional contenders such as Nasser’s Egypt, al-Assad’s Syria, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Not only do Israel’s operational constraints limit its ability to carry out regime change agendas on its own, especially in a big country such as Iran, but the spectre of existential threats from external enemies helps Israel justify its apartheid system and ongoing colonization of Palestine. Since the founding of Iran’s Islamic Republic, it too has benefited from the existence of external arch-dangers as a means of rationalizing its relentless suppression of dissent at home. Israel and the IRI have so far been mutually useful enemies rather than implacable foes.

Cynical state uses of anti-imperialist rhetoric

Faced with competing demands in a multi-ethnic society, the Iranian government has found it expedient to use the Western imperialist threat as a way to demonize local federalist or autonomist movements as destabilizing, or even as foreign conspiracies. A pro-regime scholar interviewed by the personal website of Iran’s supreme leader, for example, argues that the American and Israeli goal is “to topple the Islamic Republic, leading either to a fractured, feudal-style rule or a weak central government in Tehran that would facilitate the country’s breakup. Many in Iran have recognized this.” The left commentator Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi has echoed a version of this fear; writing in New Left Review’s Sidecar magazine, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi suggests that the recent US and Israeli aggression is “not merely a war on the Islamic Republic but on Iran itself: an attempt to turn it into a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, internally divided and too weak to enjoy sovereign development, let alone pose a regional challenge.”

This way of describing minorities’ grievances has facilitated repressive measures against those social groups. Within 24 hours of the announcement of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, three Kurdish prisoners were executed on charges of “Moharebeh (enmity against God)” and “espionage for Israel.” Hundreds of individuals, predominantly from ethnic and religious minorities, have been arrested on accusations of collaboration or espionage. Exploiting strong currents of institutional and societal xenophobia against Afghans, the Iranian government accused Afghan immigrants of spying for Israel, which intensified the mass deportation of Afghans, including many who were born and raised in Iran — one of the largest forced expulsions of a population in the last hundred years. According to UN reports, more than 1.5 million Afghans have been deported from Iran so far in 2025, 410,000 of them since the ceasefire between Iran and Israel was announced on June 24. Among those expelled in June, nearly 6700 were unaccompanied children. These populations have been deported to a country whose supreme leader and chief justice are facing International Criminal Court arrest warrants, accused of committing the crime against humanity of persecution on gender and political grounds.

It may be argued that lending support to forces opposing Western imperialism is still necessary even when the politics of the anti-imperialist side are not commendable. This stance is usually justified on the grounds that any blows to imperialism are worth supporting. If such blows were to open up space for working-class gains and social justice, such a position might have some plausibility. But that is certainly not the case with the IRI, which has advanced a deregulatory, anti-labour economic agenda, whereby independent trade unions and other workers’ organizations are severely suppressed. Even worse, the triumph of right-wing resistance to imperialism often leads to draconian measures against the local working class and minoritized groups. When, in August 2021, the US pulled out of Afghanistan and handed the country to the Taliban on a silver plate, it was hailed by some on the left as a defeat of imperialism. Yet this “defeat” meant a ban on secondary and higher education for all women and girls in Afghanistan, as well as an exodus of millions of Afghans. Similarly, while the pro-West Shah of Iran suppressed the Iranian left and killed many militant leftists, it was the so-called anti-imperialist Islamic Republic that virtually wiped out the Iranian organized left and committed a massacre of the revolutionary generation of 1979.

During the Cold War, the existence of the Communist bloc, despite all its systemic failures and undeniable cruelties, afforded certain non-Communist but anti-Western states some room to sustain varying levels of progressive policies, as part of a strategic alignment with the Communist bloc against the encroaching capitalist bloc. Combined with the pressure exerted by workers’ movements in the West, these dynamics also compelled states in the capitalist bloc to make concessions to their working classes, seen as necessary to counter the perceived ideological, political threat of socialism and communism. Today, in a post–Cold War era that has seen the emergence of a unipolar capitalist world and immense working-class setbacks in the West, resistance to imperialism by right-wing authoritarian regimes rarely has a positive impact on the lives of the oppressed. Most often, it leads to deteriorating conditions for them.

In this context, a principled anti-imperialism must centre on working-class political interests, as well as the interests of oppressed and minoritized social groups. This means siding with neither imperialism nor the right-wing authoritarian states opposing it. Such a stance recognizes the imperative to oppose occupation and genocide, and to support any credible efforts to stop the aggressors who perpetrate it, while maintaining a consistent political and ideological opposition to right-wing anti-imperialist regimes. Otherwise, there is a grave risk of legitimizing state violence and the enemies of the working class, becoming an inadvertent mouthpiece for state propaganda, and betraying the socialist principle of internationalist solidarity.

Behnam Amini is a doctoral candidate in Social and Political Thought (York University) and a longtime political activist. Behnam has written extensively on Iranian politics as well as the Kurdish question in various English and Persian journals, including but not limited to Open Democracy, The Bullet, BBC Persian, and Radio Zamaneh.