The following is a speech delivered on March 13th at a community event hosted by Researchers Against War (RAW) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). In solidarity with the peoples of Iran, Palestine, and Vietnam, the author provides a view from the grounds in the small corner of Goleta, California. World events continue to rapidly unfold making some references already dated while others are still materializing. The views expressed in the speech do not necessarily reflect those of RAW.

Ground report for March 13, 2026:

As of today, the US-Israel axis has entered the 14th day of an illegal war with Iran while the siege on Gaza and settler colonial dispossession of the West bank continues. Alongside this war with Iran, Israel has also pushed north with a ground and air assault into southern Lebanon that has taken the lives of more than 600 people, 98 of which were children (conservative count as deaths are still mounting). About 800,000 – 15 percent of the population – have been displaced as Israel’s assault reaches further into the territory past the Zahrani river.

But let’s put this all in perspective to understand the wider dynamic of what is unfolding. Since October 2023, we have witnessed an escalation of what has been decades of protracted genocide of the Palestinian people, reaching an extreme form of intensified genocide since then. The use of new technologies also makes this escalation the first historic AI war. As of today, the Gaza health ministry can confirm at least 75k deaths since October 2023, more than 600 dead since the ceasefire of the last 5 months. Both numbers are largely conservative and an undercount given the thousands still un-excavated from the rubble. Consider that 100,000 have left Gaza for refuge, about 11,000 remain unaccounted, and 90 percent of Gaza’s anthropogenic infrastructure has been destroyed.

We must not collapse these conflicts to their appearance as state-to-state encounters.

While Iran, Israel, US and regional ruling groups battle it out, targeting each other and their allies’ military, economic, and civilian infrastructure, the peoples on the ground are forced to enter into these wars as the bodies that conduct the war, bodies that are targets of the war, bodies that fuel the infrastructure of the war, and bodies that legitimate the war. They must also survive the immediate violence of these wars and face the political arrangement that remain after.

For the peoples of Iran, economic and political protest have erupted for decades leading up to the massive repression by their own regime in early January of this year. Thousands who rose up to contest the severe economic inflation and water crisis were massacred by security forces. For the peoples of Syria to Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Kurdistan, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Jordan their social infrastructure have time and again been destroyed as political leaders compete for the spoils of power. Meanwhile, the people find ways to regenerate life, culture, and their own political interests against repressive states and multinational corporations that are eager to gain capital from the trade, resources, and production forces of the region.

In this new political setting, it is not just a people’s nationhood that is targeted, as Israel try to erase Palestinians’ nationhood. Rather, state sovereignty is now under attack. This, however, is not at the hands of the people who have faced state repression. Instead, it is launched illegally by power-hungry warlords in the US and Israeli states. The political authority of states are now being tested as ruling groups of all sides try to out-gun, out-strategize, and out-maneuver each other, while some try to negotiate a neutral position to stave off internal instability.

One of the first acts of war was an US-Israeli triple-tap strike in Minab that targeted an all-girls elementary school ,killing 168, most of whom were children; school staff and the multitude of parents and family members who came in search of their children were also caught in the death toll. Then came reports of the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a number of other top Iranian officials by US-Israeli missiles. The US and Israel have also launched arial attacks on Tehran and neighboring cities and provinces. Oil refineries and uranium energy facilitates have been hit, creating massive ecological damage. City streets are on fire as ignited oil seep out to the city drains, black sooted rain falls from dark plumes of smoke that take up the skyline – fresh air and water are hard to come by making life of people under bombardment harder to sustain. Meanwhile, the regime has kept wi-fi and internet connection shut off. Phone service is limited to a few minutes per day.

In self-defense, Iran has hit various military, energy, and economic infrastructures located in Gulf countries that house US-Israeli military and political installations. The regime has also targeted US-NATO bases and vessels throughout the region, as well as multinational economic entities that have been part of the region’s normalization process – such Amazon Web Service data centers in UAE and Bahrain. Iran has also destroyed an unarmed Thai cargo ship that faced immense economic pressure to go through the Hormuz straight despite prior warnings. The ship was headed from UAE ports carrying export goods from the region to global markets in India. Iran has also successful pierced through Israel’s iron dome defense, hitting central and northern parts of occupied Palestine. As Israel receives daily strikes from Iran, the government has enforced media censorship among the citizenry and curtailing international and domestic news from reporting on Iranian missile impacts on infrastructures and lives.

While these events unfold at particular focal points, peripheral events are catalyzed as well. Iran’s attacks of Israeli embassy and US military bases in Bahrain have also set in motion political struggle among peoples on the ground. Bahrain, like Qatar and other monarchic Gulf states, have a large migrant labor force that outnumber the citizenry of these countries. Global migrants enter these countries on labor contracts akin to debt servitude where their legal, labor, and personal rights are stripped, their passports taken by bosses controlling their internal and external movements.

On either side of the Iran-Israel geographical conflict, there are conflicts and tensions rising that make this region primed for larger social instability. In the far east, a border war erupted between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the same period as Israel’s onslaught against Iran, making this conflict into another war front. On the far west, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and EU members have been pulled into the missiles exchanges as well. In Sudan, Rapid Support Forces, funded and armed by the UAE and Israel, have been impacted by shipment reroutes from the Hormuz Straight, delaying their rearmament and making them unable to continue pogrom raids throughout the country. This has opened up space for the Sudanese army to advance and recapture towns.

But as we expand our scope, we can also push our perspective back in time.

Before Israel and US took this vicious assault against Iran that meant compromising trade and oil supply to the global markets, Trump regime had in early January abducted Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan head of state, with the intention of opening up the massive domestic oil industry for global access under US state control – a pre-empt move to secure oil in the Americas if world distribution was disrupted by an escalating war in the Middle East. Cuba has also been under total siege as Trump launches the right-wing coalition of economic and political powers in the region under the “Shields of the Americas”. We can begin to see these global events come into alignment…

As we settle our view back to the US, anti-ICE efforts continue. Vermont communities are engaging in an escalated struggle with Trump’s paramilitary ICE forces. In California, ICE continues to raid through Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Central Coast. As the world’s population face-off with their political leaders and global powers, our fight at home is a face-off with political leaders who happen to also be the principal global power wreaking havoc across the globe. Today 2500 marines leave for the Middle East to fight the wars for the rich and powerful.

As these state-level geopolitical conflicts become more entangled, our struggles on the ground form along these entanglements that cross into broader connections. This makes it possible to broaden grounded efforts into global solidarities across the globe – but these connections cannot remain rhetorical.

As these wars continue, the economic situation will worsen. Countries in Southeast Asia have already reported depleted energy stores, universities are shut down and professional work forces turn to remote work to limit transportation needs. Oil supplies are constrained due to the interruption in global distribution, impacting not just transportation needs and industrial production, but healthcare services, water filtration facilities, and food systems that all rely on energy sources are strained around the globe. Countries that are experiencing the early impacts of this energy crisis have begun to implement austerity measures to limit government spending on social and welfare programs – another layer of immiseration on the lives of peoples.

Our material conditions – that is our ability to secure jobs, housing, healthcare, groceries, and even education – will further erode, along with everyone else around the world. We must come to terms with this material connection when we pursue political solidarity efforts. These conflicts in this time amount to a global war on the peoples on this planet. The natural planet itself is already at war with the system that produced this war; carbon emissions have reached irreversible levels.

In an educational setting, such as the one we find ourselves at UCSB, the role of students and academic workers are important to consider – not because we are the intellectuals that must be in leadership of any effort. We simply have a role pertaining to articulation, science, technology, and ideology that is in service to the efforts around us. As for our position within the institution, we have a role to agitate and transgress the social relations that make the institution what it is. At UCSB, the institution is a bedrock for the infrared military technology industry that these global wars use to kill and gain profits for global capitalist interests.

These technologies do not need to be used in this way, but they are because corporate and private entities hold the purse strings that dictate the type of science and technology that gets funded, impacting the curriculum priority on this campus, controlling the education students receive and the intellectual labor that is done. The UC system’s dependence on the global military industrial complex has also diminished the quality of education, inflated cost of tuition and cost of living while attending college. Property rates and rents in Goleta and Isla Vista have also risen in part because of this, effectively pushing out laboring, immigrant, and working-class populations who cannot afford the price of war making.

This bleeds into the social sciences and humanities as well, even when these disciplines are meant to study the culture, politics, and social history of our species. We must question how our programs and disciplines are funded. How does STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) funding that come from the Department of War and war-tech corporations find its way into the department budgets of the social sciences? As war and surveillance technologies find new R&D capacity at universities that peddle cheapened undergraduate and graduate STEM labor disciplines that are not directly involved are financially cut off when they conduct education and research that does not serve war. Some eventually begin to cross the ethical bounds themselves – faculty in Sociology at UCSB and UC Berkeley have received DARPA funding that advanced their disciplinary careers.

As we reassess and realign ourselves to our reality, that has only become more complex, layered in digital modalities, and hyperconnected to a global society, we can ground ourselves with a poem that expresses what we are all here for, the connections we wish to make:

Poem by Mohammed Moussa

I was trying to reach you,

but the war wouldn’t

let my feet

walk towards you.

And I’m still trying

to reach you,

even without my feet,

even before the war reaches you. Email