Israel’s attack on Iran marks the latest phase of global war capitalism—subcontracted settler-colonialism and genocidal thanatopolitics converge, as Western regimes and their enemies arm and threaten with Armageddon
~ Blade Runner ~
The Israeli state has escalated once again, launching war on Iran with a large-scale strike—Operation Rising Lion—which began on June 13, hitting over 100 sites across the country, including Tehran. The operation seeks to compromise the Iranian regime, dismantling its military command, strategic infrastructure, and governance capacity—as Netanyahu eyes his political survival.
Targets included nuclear plants, missile infrastructure, senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, nuclear scientists, Iran’s energy infrastructure, defence ministry headquarters, and residential areas. The strikes inflicted heavy civilian casualties and widespread destruction, marking the sharpest attack faced by Iran since its 1980s war with Iraq, and bringing the world one step closer to Armageddon.
Iran responded with waves of ballistic missiles and drones, numbering in the hundreds, launched toward Israel. Most were intercepted, but many struck ground targets in central Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and multiple towns, narrowly missing the Israel Defence Forces headquarters. Civilian deaths and injuries continue to rise, with many trapped under rubble.
Iranian leadership threatened American, British, and French bases in the region. To forestall further escalation, the UK deployed fighter jets, while US responses under Trump remain unpredictable.
Israel defended the operation as a response to Iran’s alleged nuclear threat, even as its own undeclared arsenal of hundreds of nuclear warheads drives the regional arms race.
Since Iran’s 1979 revolution broke their previous alliance, Israel and Iran have fought a covert shadow war — assassinations, cyber-attacks, airstrikes, proxy battles, and now, since 2023, direct missile exchanges. In recent years, Israel has systematically targeted Iran’s regional allies—Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various militias — before launching a decisive direct strike against Iran itself.
Simultaneously, Israel exploits the power vacuum in Syria, conducting bombing raids against the country’s military forces. Within this system, Israel operates as a subcontracted neo-colonial watchdog—enforcing regional control on behalf of dominant powers while pursuing its own settler-colonial project of extermination. The US-Israel axis dominates uncontested, while Russia and China stand aside, unwilling or unable to intervene. The Palestinians remain trapped under the Zionist war machine.
War-capitalism in motion
Israel is not merely a “rogue state” nor is Netanyahu a lone autocrat. This war offensive reflects capitalism’s death engine in action: a global apparatus of war-capitalism using destruction as governance and escalation as the stabiliser of state power. Far-right rhetoric fuels domestic cohesion, and the military-industrial complex profits from permanent war.
Within this architecture, the Israeli state functions as subcontractor and ideological model: a regional enforcement machine sustaining Western hegemony, while simultaneously pursuing its settler-colonial project of Indigenous elimination, permanent escalation, and racialised demographic engineering. Israel’s subcontracted role allows Western powers to maintain global dominance while outsourcing direct military management of key neocolonial zones.
Zionism continuously renews itself ideologically to sustain this war machinery. Its propaganda apparatus recasts every act of aggression as defensive survival, embedding extermination within narratives of civilisational struggle. Thus, its settler-colonial expansion is framed as a global battle for “freedom versus tyranny”—as openly articulated in liberal platforms like Politico—laundering extermination into civilisational necessity.
These narratives intersect with global far-right currents through familiar xenophobic conspiracy logics, including the Great Replacement myth: projecting fears of demographic erasure, mobilising blind rage, and co-opting public indignation into support for authoritarian rule. In this way, settler-colonial Zionism fuses with broader neo-fascist paradigms of patriarchal domination, ethnic purification, and militarised exclusion.
In both Israeli and Iranian regimes, nationalist and religious mythologies weaponise gendered hierarchies to legitimise internal repression and external aggression. Patriarchy sustains the reproduction of settler-colonial violence, theocratic rule, and military escalation, while silencing dissent and disciplining populations. Public protests in both societies have been crushed: bunkers and armed settlers in Israel; morality police, prisons, and disappearances in Iran.
Thanatopolitics
Gaza has entered its second year of siege and calculated genocide. Western powers — the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and France—are complicit, directly arming and funding Israeli operations. Italy alone delivered over €13 million in arms exports to Israel last year, while Germany remains one of its primary weapons suppliers, alongside British licenses and Dutch provision of critical F-35 parts. Despite rhetorical criticisms, all of these states—and Germany above all—have learned nothing from history.
The MAGA cult and its international cousins have normalised white supremacist authoritarianism, while an ethically bankrupt liberal centre-left and their conservative and far-right partners continue to enable extermination through silence, complicity, or direct participation.
Egypt and Jordan—along with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the wider Gulf Arab monarchies—are openly or covertly allied with Israel, through formal agreements, intelligence cooperation, or silent strategic alignment. None of these regimes have any interest in allowing an organised Palestinian resistance to take root on their territories.
This is thanatopolitics: governance through orchestrated mass death. Gaza is no battlefield—it is a death laboratory: two million starved, more than 300,000 estimated killed, and corporate media normalise it as “food insecurity” or “humanitarian crisis”.
In the meantime, mass pro-Gaza protests worldwide echo the ‘non-violent’ anti-war mobilisations of previous times, failing to bring any meaningful disruption or halt ‘war crimes’. After the 2000s and 2010s waves of revolt that were suppressed by the state and co‑opted by mainstream liberal and social‑democratic parties, dissent has been absorbed by elections, NGOs, cultist vanguard parties and parliamentary channels—neutralising any real confrontation with the war‑capitalist machine.
This global structure produces vast zones of exclusion. The excluded—indigenous, refugees, migrants, prisoners, illegalised workers—are expelled from political and economic life, holding an insurrectionary potential that remains largely unrealised.
Western regimes have perfected suppressive aggression by proxy: subcontracting to allies like Israel, while internally maintaining buffer zones of fragmented dissent—managed through surveillance, technocratic control, racialised policing (see current US uprisings) and cultural containment. Class antagonism is fractured and redirected into xenophobic rage or superficial activism, with little potential for organised anti-capitalist or anti‑colonial struggle.
We are witnessing a new phase of planetary domination: elites scrambling to retain control in a world facing climate collapse, bioregional disintegration, and technological upheaval that drives unprecedented economic restructuring. Two decades of warfare cycles—initially unleashed to suppress social unrest and restructure global capitalist production, now shift into higher gear. Surveillance, fear, and militarisation reinforce elite dominance, built upon the foundations laid by the “War on Terror.”
With Ukraine locked in permanent war and the Middle East bleeding, the century-long colonial war-game rolls on—even as the system creaks under the weight of its own violence and decay.
One way out
The only ethical response to the genocide is solidarity with the grassroots Palestinian resistance and international anti-authoritarianism. Palestinians struggle not just against the settler state, but also against PLO corruption and the authoritarian repression of Hamas.
As for the only real solution to end the crisis in the Middle East and beyond: it lies in forging a cross-national, anti-war, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist movement—against all states and regimes that keep entire populations under the boot—rooted in direct democracy and autonomy, drawing from the insurrections of past and present, from the living experiences of the Zapatistas and Rojava, and from every act of collective refusal yet to come.
Top image: Iranian missiles strike Tel Aviv
