By Jeff Mackler

The world’s people and nations in the main declared US President Donald Trump a war criminal when he announced on April 7, 2026 that, “The whole [Iranian] civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Trump’s threat of yet another US genocide, this time against the Iranian nation of 90 million, follows the Biden administration-Zionist Israeli’s genocidal slaughter of 70,000 Palestinians two years ago.  That horror is ongoing.

That the US imperialist beast, whose annual military and related expenditures, at nearly $3 trillion, exceed the world’s combined total, had already destroyed over the past 40 days much of Iran’s industrial, economic, energy and above ground military infrastructure. Iran’s steel mills, oil refineries, naval bases, ships, planes, hospitals, pharmaceutical plants, bridges and railroads, not to mention whole villages, stand in ruin. Yet the Iranians remain far from defeated – still capable of launching powerful salvos of ballistic missiles, rocket and drone attacks from their deeply underground locations. US military bases in the surrounding US-allied Gulf State monarchies and Zionist Israel are key targets. The Iranian-controlled Strait of Hormuz’s shipping lanes that facilitate the transport some 20 percent of the world oil are largely impassable. 

“More is to come” Trump pledged in response to Iran’s ongoing military viability in the face of the world’s most lethal power, including bombing Iran, Trump bragged, “back to the Stone Age.”

To date, the US slaughter has included bombings of 30 Iranian universities, 600 schools, and 120 cultural cites. Thousands of Iranians have been murdered and more wounded.

The “f*****g moron” Trump, is a term employed by Trump’s Secretary of State and former Exxon Mobile chief, Rex Tillerson after Trump had left a National Security Council meeting. Trump suggested that the US increase its stash of tactical nuclear weapons one hundred fold. That Trump might well deploy these tactical nukes in the future when vital US imperialist interests are seriously threatened cannot be excluded. The US imperial monsters are from total restrain, always considering, experimenting, testing and researching new and horrific measures wherein their ever-sophisticated weapons can significantly prevail over all others. Insanity? Yes! But never to be excluded in a world capitalist system faced with ever-deepening crises, ever-diminishing markets, ever-declining average profit rates, ever-increasing worldwide competition and ever-desperate leaders driven to endless wars the world over. It is not the seemingly pitiful off-the-charts crude braggart that Trump daily portrays to his kept media but the capitalist system itself. US imperialism’s endless bi-partisan wars, its imposition of punishing tariffs against its competitors, its expenditure of addition $trillions on war, its rigged stock and financial markets and its massive social spending cuts inform us that the system itself is the problem, not one or another happenstance president “elected” every four years in a game that only billionaires can play.

Mass murderer Trump calls for an “Iranian Revolution”

Trump’s call on the Iranian people to rise up to overthrow the Iranian government, several of whose central leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have already been assassinated by clandestine Zionist agents, failed to bring a single person into the streets. Indeed, in the face of Trump’s fascist-like threats and saturation bombings tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Iranians have courageously mobilized on bridges, rail cars and power plant sites daring Trump to murder them in broad daylight.

US and Israel near instantly violate “ceasefire agreement”

Hours before Trump’s threat to obliterate ever more of Iranian society, the beast appeared to have brokered a two-week ceasefire with Iran, negotiated with the assistance of the Pakistani government. The Ten Point Proposed Iranian Plan, according to the Statement of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, was touted by Trump as a basis for ending the war. But within hours of the “agreement” the Zionist regime, with US approval, launched its most intensive wave of bombings to date, killing over 250 Lebanese and wounding 1,000 more in 100 air strikes over a period of ten minutes.

The strikes came as the Zionist government and the Trump administration claimed that the ceasefire did not include Lebanon, despite the fact that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharifsaid, who had presided over the negotiations, affirmed that “Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, effective immediately.” Trump’s near-instant violation of the “ceasefire” informs us once again that such “treaties” are near worthless, if not unenforceable, given that no international body has the will or power or authority to enforce them. The International World Court’s condemnation of the Zionist genocide in Palestine is a prime example.

The official terms of the now near-defunct “ceasefire” agreement, according to several eyewitness observers, included the following:

1 Organizing passage through the Strait of Hormuz in coordination with the Iranian Armed Forces, in a manner that grants Iran a decisive economic and geopolitical role in the strait.

2 Ending the war against all components of the “Axis of Resistance,” which Iran presents as an acknowledgment of the failure of Israeli military operations.

3 Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from all bases and military deployment points in the region.

4 Establishing an official security protocol for navigation in the Strait of Hormuz that guarantees Iran a supervisory role according to an agreed-upon mechanism.

5 Payment of full compensation to Iran for war damages, based on a comprehensive assessment of the losses it has suffered.

6 Complete lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions imposed on Iran.

7 Cancellation of all resolutions issued against Iran by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and by the United Nations Security Council.

8 Release of all Iranian assets and funds frozen abroad.

9 Endorsement of these arrangements in a binding resolution issued by the UN Security Council.

10 Transforming the agreement into binding international law that ensures its implementation and consolidates Iran’s security and political gains.

Republicans and Democrats: Twin parties of US Imperialism’s genocide

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats, led by Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer, are posturing as peacemakers, insisting that Trump seek the “required constitutional approval” to pursue imperialism’s latest war. For Schumer, who led Genocide Joe Biden’s mass murder of the Palestinian masses in 2024, abiding by the technical rules of the imperialist state power is always primary, unless the ruling rich, who determine all critical aspects of US policy, decide otherwise!  Biden and Schumer’s Democrats presided over the murder of some 70,000 Palestinians following the October 7, 2023 surprise escape/breakout of thousands of Palestinians from the world’s largest open-air Zionist-administered prison in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians were subsequently wounded and millions more driven from their homes while the Gaza infrastructure was decimated and Israel began a process of ridding all Palestinians from their historic homeland.

The warmongering Democrats operate on the “principle” that the US people have short memories. Perhaps this time out, they calculate, posing as a “peace party” in the run up to the mid-term elections, the White House, if not majorities in the House and Senate will be theirs.

Genocide is the norm not the exception with regard to all imperialist nations.

Indeed, World Wars I and II saw more than 100 million dead as the great imperialist powers fought over the domination and expansion of their colonial slave states that they had conquered.

These wars marked the first time in human history that the population of major sections of the world declined. Genocide was the international norm! At the turn of the 20^th century Belgian King Leopold II’s personal colony, the Congo Free State, saw 12 million Black Africans perish at Leopold’s orders, the largest genocide in world history, according to Adam Hochschild’s 1998 “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.”

Leopold’s genocide operated to maintain his slave state, as with slavery in the US, but where the slavocracy’s prized crop was “King Cotton.” The Congo’s central crop was rubber, owned exclusively by Leopold, infamous for cutting off the hands of captured escaped enslaved workers. Yet, Leopold toured the US in the name of combating “Arab slavery,” seeking the support of US abolitionists! But the lesser imperialist Belgium, and Leopold, relegated to the almost impassible central Africa, was compelled to grant its subsoil mineral rights to a more dominant imperialist nation, namely the US. Today, and beginning, without interruption in the early 20^th century, these rights were ceded to two of the richest imperialists on earth – the US Rockefeller and Morgan behemoths, today the JP Morgan Chase trillionaire banking empire – the largest in the world.

Mark Twain’s classic 1905 pamphlet, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, exposed Leopold’s horrors. It was banned in the US while Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn circulated freely.

The history of European colonization, not to mention the colonization of the US, had been justified by the racist colonizers with the proposition that its conquered or to-be-conquered victims were either subhuman, heathen idolaters, and, more recently, communists and terrorists. In the language of today’s racist Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Palestinians are “animals in human form.” Trump’s characterizations of Palestinians and Iranians are not too dissimilar. Today, if the historically illegitimate Israeli colonial government has its way, the Palestinian people are slated for annihilation. That process is already underway.

Again, the European conquest and enslavement of Africa was the first time in human history that the population of a continent dramatically declined. Six million African slaves perished at the hands of the US slavers alone and countless millions more Native American “savages”! The English, French, Portuguese, Italian, German and Spanish slavers also took their toll in countless millions. And when the African people valiantly fought back, weapons in hand, however crude, they were declared uncivilized savages.

Origins of the Israeli Settler State

Today, the world is witness to the colonial Zionist Israeli entity’s saturation bombing of southern Lebanon, no doubt aimed at a further expansion of the borders of the US-allied settler state. Genocide, once again, pure and simple! No different from the genocide of Native Americans and indigenous people the world over: no different from Leopold’s Congo, and, once again, with US complicity, praise, and military support!

History of Zionist Colonization

Israel did not exist before 1948, when the World War II imperialist victors, meeting at the United Nations, decreed that an Israeli state was to be carved out of historic Palestine, then a British “Mandate,” a polite imperialist word for conquered colony. The Zionist colonizers were granted 56 percent of the country. The Palestinians, being British colonial “subjects,” had no say in the matter.

Great Britain originally “acquired” Palestine following the World War I inter-imperialist conflagration and worldwide slaughter that resulted in the victors’ division of the vanquished Ottoman Empire. England and France, which in the 19^th century had partaken in the colonial subjugation and division of Africa, set out to do the same in the Middle East. Pencils and pens in hand, a host of diplomats divided up the Ottoman Empire and assigned the sections outside Turkey itself to the French and British imperialists.

Previously, in 1917, the Zionist movement, at that time a tiny rightwing minority among the world’s Jewish population, pledged to be Britain’s colonial overseers in Palestine. With the 1917 Balfour Declaration they brokered an accord with the British Empire. Signed by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour and the British Zionist leader, Baron Walter Rothschild II, the agreement read in part: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The latter portion of this declaration was included to portray the British Empire and its associated Zionist colonizer allies as merely living side by side with their Palestinian “neighbors.” Ninety percent of the population of Palestine at that time was Palestinian Arabs.

“The Iron Wall of Jewish Bayonets”

Perhaps the leading ideological forbearer of “Revisionist Zionism” was Vladimir Jabotinsky, who authored the benchmark essay for the entire Zionist movement, “The Iron Wall.” (The earlier form of Zionism, with pacifist and socialist tones, nevertheless contemplated establishing a Jewish homeland to be carved out of some conquered nation with the approval of its imperialist conqueror. South Africa and Uganda, recommended by the Zionist leaders to the British imperialists, were among the nations that had been considered for this project.)

In 1923, Jabotinsky spelled out the Zionist credo without equivocation: “Whether through the Balfour Declaration or the [British] Mandate, external force is a necessity for establishing in the country [Palestine] conditions of rule and defense to which the local population, regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role—with strength and without indulgence. In this, there are no meaningful differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.”

Jabotinsky continued: “To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer, ‘absolutely untrue.’ This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes—not for any sweet words, not for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall.” [For a comprehensive overview, see Socialist Action’s pamphlet, “The Hidden History of Zionism” by Ralph Schoenman.]

European Jewish immigration to Palestine increased dramatically following Hitler’s coming to power in 1933. Jewish land purchases and new Jewish settlements rapidly ensued. Palestinian resistance to British control and Zionist settlements climaxed with the massive Arab revolt of 1936-39, which Britain brutally suppressed with the help of Zionist militias.

The Partition of Palestine and Zionist War

Within days of the 1948 partition of Palestine, Zionism’s terrorist armies, this time with British weapons in hand, declared war on the near defenseless Palestinian people, inside and outside of the new Zionist state, as well as on all surrounding Arab nations that rejected the UN’s imperialist partition.

Three hundred eighty-five Palestinian villages were razed to the ground, renamed, and reconstituted as Israeli towns. In the course of this 1948-49 war and expansion of Israel, 726,000 Palestinians were driven from their land, with many moving to Gaza and the West Bank (of the Jordan River) or dispersed to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere. With the destruction of their towns and villages, “vacated” Palestinian land was decreed Israeli state property under the 1950 “Absentee Property Law.”

Until 1947, Jewish land ownership in Palestine was six percent. The rest belonged to the Palestinian people. Today that figure is essentially reversed. Palestinian lands have been systematically stolen by force. By 1949 Israel occupied 78 percent of Palestine. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, the percentage was increased to 100 — that is, Israel occupied all of historic Palestine.

These so-called Occupied Territories of 1967 were and remain subject to the systematic construction of Israeli settlements, despite the vague 1995 “Oslo agreement,” wherein Gaza and the West Bank would be under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian Authority, whose leaders were to be elected by Palestinians in that 22 percent of the original, but Israeli-dominated Palestine.

But Israeli settlements in the West Bank continued without interruption, as they do to this moment with the Zionist fanatics embarking on their latest horror, the physical obliterated of Gaza and its people as well as the ongoing slaughter of the Hezbollah-allied Lebanese masses who dare to defend Palestinians, not to mention the Iranian masses, similarly threatened by Trump with extinction.

The Unconditional Right of Poor and Oppressed Nations to Self-Determination

In the historic view of the socialist movement, and people of good will everywhere, poor and oppressed nations and peoples have the unconditional right to self-determination and freedom, including the right to fight for these basic concepts against their oppressors, as they have done on every continent on earth.

Might we add that demanding a “peaceful solution” to the historic colonization of Palestine, via a return to diplomacy and negotiations, stands in opposition to the inviolable principle of self-determination of colonized people? Israel is a rogue, illegitimate state, carved out of historic Palestinian lands, subordinate to US imperialism in its central policies, essentially serving as the US gendarme in the region. Today, the Zionist entity openly bombs Iranian nuclear facilities and assassinates Iranian scientists. It facilitated in 1982 the Lebanese fascist slaughter of 3500 mostly Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It bombed Syria at the behest of the US/NATO/Gulf monarchies. It is nothing less than US imperialism’s designated enforcer wherever US interests are threatened by oppressed people.

We do not condemn Hamas for its resistance in Gaza! We do not condemn Iran for defending itself against the world’s ever threatening US murderers!  Neither do we condemn any poor and oppressed people on earth when they demand and fight for their freedom! We are and have always been partisans of the Palestinian people and of Cuban, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Chilean, Guatemalan, Haitian, Iranian, Afghan, Libyan, Syrian and Vietnamese people as they resisted imperialist war and intervention even if we sometimes disagree with some of their policies.

Cuba’s US-backed Batista regime murdered 50,000. Somoza’s murdered 50,000 Nicaraguans; Pinochet slaughtered 60,000 in Chile; the US/NATO/Gulf State monarchies murdered 500,000 in Syria; 400,000 were murdered by the US-backed death squad regime in Guatemala; the US murdered four million in Vietnam and tens of thousands more in Haiti, and Libya!

The list of US-backed wars and interventions is endless. Is Israel’s racist apartheid murderous colonial history any different? Has it ever stood on the side of oppressed people fighting for their freedom anywhere? Is the US slaughter in Iran today any different?

Even the Zionist-oriented New York Times was compelled to admit that decades of “talk” about the “two state solution,” in truth had zero content. Buttressed by ongoing annual $billions to the Zionist war machine, among the most powerful and technological sophisticated on earth, and deployed against US enemies from Syria to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Libya and beyond, the Zionist murderers have made clear, for 79 years now, that Israel’s future, from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea is incompatible with the existence of the Palestinian people.

The Iranian masses have made it similarly clear. They have properly opposed the US intervention in 1953 that overthrew the elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh and imposed the dictator Shah Reza Pahlavi. They have mobilized in unprecedented numbers, seven million in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, to remove the US imposed regime based on the CIA-created SAVAK, that imprisoned more of its people than any other nation on earth and boasted the regions most powerful armed forces. And they fought with unprecedented courage to defeat the US-backed Iraq intervention of Saddam Hussein in a ten-year struggle that saw the Iranian people lose one million fighters and the Iraqis 800,000.

Socialists do not demand “negotiations” or a “ceasefire” or a “just solution” to the “Iranian or Palestinian problem” – all code words or expressions premised on extending legitimacy to the US and Zionist states.

Our program includes:

• For united front mass mobilizations to stop the US/Israeli genocide of the Iranian and Palestinian people! US Out Now!
• $Trillions for Human Needs, not one penny for US wars everywhere!
• End all aid to apartheid Israel, military, political and diplomatic!
• Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions!
• For a democratic secular Palestine from the river to the sea with the unconditional right of return of all dispossessed Palestinians – a society, where all people can live in peace as equals!
• For a socialist federation of the Middle East!
• Freedom and victory to the Iranian and Palestinian masses!
• End all deportations! Abolish ICE! No human being is illegal!
• End the fossil fuel destruction of the environment! For a rapid transition to safe, clean energy systems with guaranteed top union wages for all who lose their jobs in the transition!
• For Socialism! Join us!

To Donate See: Socialistaction.org Contact: socialistaction@lmi.net

Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of Socialist Action and twice its U.S. presidential candidate. He is a founder and Administrative Committee member of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). He was a National Steering Committee member of the Assangedefense.org, the Director of The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal/Northern California and a founder of the Northern California Climate Mobilization. He can be reached at socialistaction.org or at jmackler@lmi.net