Block the Bombs, Shut Down the Ports!

Defeat Israel’s war drive on Iran!

16 June 2025

The Zionist surprise attack on Iran that began on 12 June threatens to escalate into full-scale war, drawing in even more direct military involvement by Western imperialist forces. It is unlikely that this will remain a “tit-for-tat” exchange of drones and missiles as in previous confrontations. American-made Israeli stealth jets, and drones launched by Israel from within Iran itself, killed the majority of Iran’s senior military leaders, while Iranian drones and ballistic missiles have been hammering Tel Aviv. Further battles across the Levant and Arabia are likely, with Iran still holding sway over the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” and Israel attempting to do all it can to provoke the direct and open intervention of its imperialist patrons. The international working class must act decisively to defeat Israeli aggression—by turning imperialist-backed war into class war in the ports, arms factories and supply chains that sustain the Zionist killing machine.

As in previous Israeli escalations, some Western officials have sought to distance themselves from the Israeli attacks. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio lyingly claimed: “We are not involved in strikes against Iran” (whitehouse.gov, 12 June). For months, Israel had pushed for strikes on Iranian facilities threatening its regional nuclear monopoly, while the Trump administration appeared to resist, supposedly seeking space for negotiations. Yet as Axios (13 June) reports, in the hours after the attack Israeli officials acknowledged they had been given “a clear U.S. green light,” while Washington was “only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public” as a ruse to lull Tehran into a false sense of security and “convince Iran that no attack was imminent.” Donald Trump has made Washington’s leading role crystal clear, posting on Truth Social: “Two months ago I gave Iran a 60-day ultimatum to 'make a deal.’ They should have done it! Today is day 61.” He has publicly praised the attacks as “excellent” and “very successful,” threatening that “the next already planned attacks [will be] even more brutal” if Iran fails to submit.

It is obvious that Western imperialist powers have substantially backed Israel’s new war. In addition to the constant flow of weapons and supplies fueling its genocide in Gaza and attacks on neighboring states, they have stepped up deployments of their own warships and planes around Iran to increase pressure and provide better intelligence to Israel. Moreover, during recent Iranian drone retaliations, imperialist forces participated in shootdowns with both missiles and targeting data. Such “defensive” actions are a direct form of military support, ensuring Israeli success in offensive actions without fear of reprisal.

The Israeli state is not the puppet of the West, nor simply a regional power like any other. It is serving as the attack dog of Western imperialism: a beast kept on a leash loose enough to maintain the fiction that those who hold it are not responsible for its maulings. It can be starved a little with token arms restrictions or sanctions on its settlers without changing the underlying dynamic. Only international working-class action—like that recently taken by courageous dockworkers in Fos-sur-Mer, Genoa, Salerno, Scilla and Piraeus blocking Israeli war materiel—can truly weaken it. And only the united working class within Israel-Palestine—Arab, Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, Beta Israel and Druze—can put it down for good.

‘Axis of Resistance’

Over the course of the assault on Gaza, Iran’s network of regional allies, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ansar Allah (“Houthi”) movement of Yemen—the “Axis of Resistance”—has proven itself little more than an extension of Iranian foreign policy, doing little to justify the illusions of many Middle Eastern workers and oppressed in its pseudo anti-imperialist credentials. Iran’s message to these allies has been consistent since the start: disengage and wait for orders from Tehran. This approach has cost it support among the Palestinian masses and allowed Hezbollah to be slowly isolated and bled in Lebanon. The exception has been Ansar Allah, its most radical petty-bourgeois section, whose blockade of the Red Sea and missile attacks on Israel at hopelessly long ranges—all while fending off imperialist and Saudi interventions—have won it the admiration of many.

Yet hope in any bourgeois military resistance to Israeli aggression or its imperialist backers is ultimately unfounded. Radical paramilitaries like Ansar Allah may well pursue military resistance even if regional allied powers stand down. But even if military pressure on Israel from foreign forces were to reach a far higher level, this could only send the Jewish working class further into its siege mentality, binding it tighter to Netanyahu or Itamar Ben-Gvir. Bourgeois warfare comes down to a question of quantities: Who has the most planes, the most technological advantages, the most allies? Clever asymmetric tactics and selective appeals to popular anti-imperialist or internationalist sentiment can only temporarily obscure this basic fact.

Class warfare is altogether different. Revolutionary action turns struggles into a question of qualitative advantages in program and political appeal, making a mockery of technical and numerical advantages. As Leon Trotsky wrote in his appraisal of the 1905 revolution:

“What pathetic superstition to believe that the historical chances of revolutions can be measured by the caliber of rifles or the diameter of guns! The Russian revolution showed once more that people are not ruled by rifles, guns, and battleships: in the final analysis, rifles, guns, and battleships are controlled by people.”
—Trotsky, 1905

A rise in international class struggle creates a completely new balance of forces, measured not in the number of guns and missiles at the frontlines, but the political will of workers to make them, ship them and control in which direction they are pointed.

The working class’s ability to intervene in Israel’s wars remains limited, but concrete support is spreading. Recent actions by port workers in France, Italy and Greece have disrupted key shipments to the Israeli military (see Labor Notes, 12 June). Similar action at Israeli ports like Haifa would deal a serious blow—but while the dockworkers in Israel’s most ethnically mixed city have struck before (most recently in 2014), segregation is increasing and the hold of Zionist ideology, the repressive Histadrut union apparatus and severe legal penalties have prevented any working-class disruptions to Israel’s wars beyond strikes limited to the Arab minority. Still, under the combined pressure of European dock actions and the fallout from Israel’s latest offensive, the possibility of industrial action spreading into the Jewish working class cannot be ruled out—particularly if Netanyahu’s campaign falters.

Beyond Palestine, the transformation of massive but cross-class popular rage against genocide into directed class struggle threatens Israel’s supply lines and alliances. The actions of dockworkers and protesters in Morocco in April—where shipments of stealth fighter parts were blocked amid demonstrations and refusals to handle “hot cargo”—constitutes a threatening precedent for Arab ruling classes that maintain alliances or passive partnerships with Israel. While the “Global March to Gaza” launched from Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt has had little working-class content, the massive repression it faces in Egypt at Israel’s request could mobilize the Egyptian unions. Should mass demonstrations and symbolic convoys give way to actual blockades and strikes, the Arab bourgeoisies that maintain explicit or tacit alliances with Israel will be thrown into crisis, and imperialism will face new fronts of resistance.

An expansion of working-class actions against Israel and imperialism is not remotely in the interests of the “Axis of Resistance.” The Iranian regime is built atop an alliance of clerics and capitalists, haunted by a working class with a living memory of how proletarian involvement in the 1979 Islamic Revolution was drowned in blood. Only last month, a truckers’ strike over low wages and high fuel prices crippled much of the economy, as had actions by oil and gas workers the year before. The Iranian bourgeoisie is well aware that even where working-class actions would further its military aims, it cannot afford the likely consequences of supporting them. The politics of the Axis of Resistance are thus kept along strictly sectarian lines: while it might talk of a fight between imperialism and the oppressed at times, it is clear that what the Axis means is not a fight by the workers and poor farmers against foreign capital but Shia against Jews, their American backers and their Sunni or Christian collaborators. Such a politics is not only directly counterposed to workers’ power but self-defeating on its own terms, being unable to mobilize forces beyond the existing allies of the Iranian regime.

Thus while an escalation in working-class action would militarily benefit the Axis, this cannot extend to support for its sectarian and bourgeois politics. As with every fight between an imperialist-backed power and a non-imperialist rival, this war will produce a strong political current across many strata that blurs the difference between military and political support. Some will view Marxists who give no political support to the Ayatollah to be unreliable anti-imperialists, while others will take the misogyny or repression of the Iranian regime as a reason to deny that its military defeat would be a disaster for the working class and oppressed and massively strengthen Israel and the United States. The global moral outrage at Israel’s genocide certainly boosts the former current and may turn illusions in the Resistance Axis into a major barrier to working-class politics in many countries. Marxists must thread this needle, opposing both tendencies towards passive or implicit support for imperialism (which includes liberal pacifism) and towards illusions that the Axis will transcend its bourgeois, sectarian limitations.

Class Struggle against Imperialist War

Even if the current round of fighting is paused, strategic warfare across the Middle East is a cat that will not go back in the bag. Netanyahu has staked his political future on a decisive confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program. Should direct attacks on Tehran cease, they will likely be redirected elsewhere in the region, such as Yemen, Iraq or Lebanon.

We should not be deluded into thinking that the working class will necessarily rise up and strike serious blows against genocidal Zionism or imperialist warmongering tomorrow, next month or by the end of the present conflict. There are promising signs: workers in a range of countries are beginning to break through the political fog to carry out exemplary actions at ports and arms facilities. However, these are limited in scope, coordination and sometimes reflect the spread of a classless “activist” consciousness into depoliticized unions more than the rise of a stable class-struggle orientation. Small-scale actions of this type have occurred since October 2023, with their real impact, duration or spread beyond small “red” unions often difficult to assess. The actions of June 2025 have shown real momentum, but elsewhere, bureaucratic suppression, demoralization, BDS resolutions and endless marches under ceasefire slogans still dominate.

The path to real working-class power does not lie in spontaneous explosions of global action, but in political work that at first appears too slow, too modest, too disconnected from the urgency of genocide and war. Yet action on a global level is impossible without sustained victories on the regional level, while regional waves of strikes or blockades are impossible without a great degree of political will and coordination between unions or other organs of the working class. And that requires militant caucuses within the unions to challenge the passivity and inaction of the labor bureaucracy. Those caucuses will not form themselves; they will be built by a cohesive revolutionary organization. Very few wish to undertake such apparently humble goals of forming a functioning revolutionary propaganda group while history seems to be calling on them for greater things: an end to genocide, the liberation of whole peoples, the destruction of bourgeois states. But the alternative is paralysis, and the constant search for new sources of hope in more powerful, but forever disappointing, bourgeois forces that ultimately have very different aims and interests.

Working-class militants have to start the fight now: build united-front actions with other workers in the face of bureaucratic pushback; bring class-struggle politics back into union meetings to challenge the bureaucrats; spread talk of pickets and hot cargos against war materiel. Block the bombs—shut down the ports! If it doesn’t yet seem realistic, then ask what must be done to make it so.

Defend Iran against imperialist/Israeli attacks!
For class struggle against genocide and imperialist war!
Break with bourgeois leaderships! For socialist revolution across the Middle East!