A Successful General Strike Requires Trauma-Informed Mutual Aid

To strike at scale and over the long-term, we need to build real trust so that we can lean on each other when the paychecks stop.

By Sahaja Serpent

March 6, 2026

Source: Waging Nonviolence


Protesters march through downtown Minneapolis during the Jan. 23 general strike. (Instagram/becomingalexisj)


The dream of a national general strike to paralyze multiple major industries or corporations is gaining traction.

Across the nation, voices are rising with a righteous call for collective action at scale, especially in the wake of ongoing local economic strikes and protests against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. The Day of Truth and Freedom on Jan. 23 gave a glimpse of the power of everyday people to make the system tremble. Over 50,000 people poured into downtown Minneapolis in the middle of the workday, braving temperatures of 20 below zero. Roughly a thousand businesses were shuttered, and organizers estimate that a million Minnesotans supported the action. The level of participation demonstrated the power of strikes to energize activists even as we have been grieving the murders, blatant cruelty and torture perpetrated by ICE agents.

What has happened in Minnesota will only add momentum to other efforts to build toward general strikes: There is a national call to strike when 3.5 percent of the current U.S. population commits to it, an ongoing push for regional strikes by Blackout The System and a plan by the United Auto Workers for a general strike on May Day 2028. These calls for general strikes reflect a yearning to reclaim agency from systems that profit from exhaustion, division and despair. They also emphasize that to halt the slide into fascism and climate collapse, we must disrupt business as usual, awaken a shared sense of moral and civic sovereignty, and wield our collective economic power.

Recently, Aru Shiney-Ajay, a Minneapolis-based organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said in an interview that Jan. 23 “was a fantastic start.” But to get to a real general strike, she added that “it’s going to take a lot more work.”

Indeed, pulling off a successful long-term general strike in this large and diverse country will require unprecedented organizing. It will place great demands on each of us — on both a personal and collective level.

This need for deeper organizing could be seen when the call for a “general strike” on Jan. 30 did not materialize nationwide despite the increasing momentum after Alex Pretti’s murder.

As we lay the groundwork for future strikes, we should not overlook another essential ingredient to their success: Strong movements require deep mutual support. We must ensure that strikers and their families have their fundamental needs met when conventional economic systems are being challenged. We need to support one another despite the messages we receive from our culture that it is unsafe to rely on one another. In other words, we will not be able to strike at scale and over the long-term unless we learn how to collaborate through distrust, fear and trauma.
Practicing interdependence amidst trauma

We must learn to depend on one another for our very lives: for food, shelter and safety from violence. This sort of dependence is called, in movement speak, mutual aid. Mutual aid — the practice of voluntary, reciprocal exchange within a community — is not a peripheral support activity; it is the essential infrastructure that will make a prolonged strike possible. The promise of mutual aid is that we learn to depend on one another rather than rely on the broken institutions we’re striking against.

In the past, notable mutual aid networks have been organized in response to the COVID pandemic, natural disasters and to support teacher strikes, among many other causes. And under tremendous risk, inspiring and self-organized mutual aid efforts have sprung up — neighborhood by neighborhood — in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other cities targeted by ICE over the last year.

However, the scale of mutual aid needed for a long-term general strike will be much larger than anything we have seen to date. It wouldn’t be just the marginalized or immigrant families that will need “aid.” People who are currently employed and supporting others will also need to survive without relying on mainstream structures. The mutual aid networks that emerged over the past two months in Minneapolis are a solid step in the right direction. Beyond the rent assistance and food delivery systems for immigrants sheltering at home, restaurants, places of worship and coffee shops have opened their doors to feed neighbors for free and supply ICE patrollers with gas masks, hand-warmers and whistles. We need to continue building on this momentum.

The hyperindividualistic capitalist script tells us to rely only on ourselves, that we must work hard and make enough money to secure our own food, health and shelter. But that system is designed to fail, and too many of us and our neighbors are vulnerable, exploited and denied access to our basic human needs. A poorly planned strike risks making those injustices even worse if people step away from their sources of income. This is the trap: We wouldn’t need to strike if we had a safety net, but without a safety net, striking is far more difficult.

Mutual aid is how we break this circular logic. But here’s the big problem: Collective traumas have robbed our society of the willingness to depend on one another — to give and receive support as if our lives depend on it. Mutual aid is a trust fall, but many of us still need to learn to trust one another. Past or ongoing money and class trauma make some of us believe that our economic privilege was justly earned — that we have the right to hoard our resources and to not share what we have with others. For others, financial stress keeps us stuck in the systems that are killing our biosphere and degrading our souls. Racism causes a similar spiritual degradation, teaching us that some people are more deserving of our support than others.

Our bodies are so traumatized that interdependence feels unsafe for most of us. We believe the narrative that living alone with a six-figure salary is safer than living in deep interdependence with our community. Or that working four part-time jobs to pay our rent is our destiny, and no one can help us change this fate. Our inability to trust one another is capitalism’s great victory. The unspoken truth is that we are lonely, traumatized, dysregulated and grieving. We are trying to build a movement with bodies and hearts locked in states of fight, flight or freeze. We can make brilliant intellectual arguments for mutual aid, but without an embodied sense of safety, healing and belonging, these networks remain abstract — impossible to lean on when the paychecks stop.
But I am not traumatized!

“But I’m not traumatized!” I have heard this so often in my work of bringing trauma healing practices and frameworks to activist communities. Especially from men and white people. Any conversation about emotions can seem like a waste of time in a culture obsessed with productivity and rationality. But in a world in which we are bombarded with news of genocides perpetrated with our tax dollars, unhoused people dying on our streets, a mental health crisis among children, an opioid epidemic, police brutality, mass extinctions and unfolding climate chaos, none of us are shielded from the violence of this world. Our collective stubborn insistence that we are “just fine” can actually be a symptom of disassociation and trauma, not a sign of true well-being.

Crucially, the most insidious and primal traumas are personal. Too many of us did not receive the unconditional love from our families and society that is so essential for human flourishing. We were treated as less than the sacred beings that we are. Even worse, many of us have experienced acute familial violence. I also never fail to be struck by the fact that 60 percent of kids in the U.S. have faced at least one of the following: sexual abuse, physical beatings, domestic violence or alcoholism in their family. And personal trauma can be rooted in many realities of life beyond childhood abuse: intergenerational racial pain, dysfunctional societal power dynamics, and income and wealth disparities.

How do we enable more people to participate in the mutual aid that will be essential to carrying out a general strike? We can share information about how neighborhoods can meet fundamental human needs. We can advocate for healthy, grassroots decision-making. We can educate one another about conflict resolution processes and transformative justice. But does information and political education alone inspire people to act? No.

It is important to recognize that an intellectual understanding of mutual aid is fundamentally different than actually practicing mutual aid. Many of us understand that our daily actions harm the water, soil or other species, yet we continue engaging in them. We understand that there is no truly ethical consumption under capitalism, and yet we continue to consume. Our habitual consumption despite knowledge of its harms can intensify pain and trauma.

Consider the legacy of scarcity: A person might intellectually champion a political movement, but when the moment comes to contribute, they are flooded with a paralyzing anxiety they don’t understand. Later, they remember a story: “My mother lived in her car before I was born.” This isn’t just a memory; it’s an inherited, somatic warning that shouts, “Your safety is your money alone! Sharing is risking destitution!” The body’s survival impulse overrides the mind’s political commitment.

Or consider the shame of dependency: Another organizer, eager to dedicate themselves fully to the movement, feels a knot in their stomach at the idea of quitting their corporate job. The obstacle isn’t a lack of conviction, but shame at the thought of becoming dependent on others. In a society that equates self-sufficiency with virtue, the vulnerability of needing support can feel like a profound moral failure. Trauma whispers in our bodies that we should stay in a compromising job rather than face the perceived humiliation of mutual reliance.

Moving from the theory to practice of mutual aid means confronting the emotional and traumatic barriers that block us from exercising true interdependence. To build a resilient movement, we must bridge this gap between knowing and feeling. We must embody the beauty and joy of radical interdependence with other humans, and with the Earth itself.

Unless we can access the subterranean emotions preventing us from living this radical practice, it will remain little more than an intellectual exercise for most of us. Political education, when not coupled with emotional sensitivity, doesn’t land in our hearts. In fact, political education without trauma awareness can bind us deeper into our siloed opinions where we don’t see each other’s genuine needs and grief under the surface of our opinions. Many of us debate meaningless political differences rather than actually practicing mutual aid.

A trauma-informed practice of mutual aid in our daily life would look like us acknowledging our past traumas, fears or hesitations and yet offering our time, money and even bodies to our community members. This ability to “see” our traumas and act in spite of them is possible when we can tap into a strong sense of groundedness — and even joy — in our sense of belonging to our community, and hopefully our spiritual practice.
The power of multiracial coalitions

A general strike — and the mutual aid effort necessary to sustain it — requires a multiracial coalition. A multiracial coalition is crucial not just as a moral necessity, but also as a strategic necessity rooted in demography, economics, history and the current reality of who serves as essential workers. Historically, some of the most militant and class-conscious segments of the U.S. working class have been workers of color, precisely because they face the compounded exploitation of low wages, unsafe conditions and systemic racism.

A multiracial coalition will make the movement less vulnerable to attempts by the ruling class to break strikes by exploiting racial differences through the age-old tactic of “divide and conquer.” Workers of color are disproportionately concentrated in the most exploited and strategically vital sectors (e.g. warehousing and logistics, hospitality, domestic care and agriculture) where a strike would have maximum impact. Therefore, a multiracial coalition would be able to mobilize workers at the economy’s critical chokepoints and build on the most effective traditions of labor struggle. A strike without this foundation is a ship with a hull breach; it may set sail in calm weather, but it will not survive the storm.

Building a multiracial coalition depends on confronting racial trauma. This trauma isn’t an abstract concept. It lives in the daily, embodied experiences of our potential comrades. It shows up in our meetings, in our resource sharing and in our silences. We witness it arise when a low-income femme of color calculates how to ask for rent help from her community while listening to others casually plan their summer vacations. She may wonder, “Can they truly understand what ‘mutual aid’ means when my survival is only an abstraction to them?”

Or imagine a gentle, well-intentioned white man who can recite the statistics on racial wealth disparity but cannot feel in his body the pain of the mother in his group who works overtime to make ends meet. He overlooks her deep fatigue, the fear of a single missed shift, or the weight of an entire lineage of forced resilience. His intellectual declarations for justice become a wall, not a bridge. He has an inability to fully embody the empathy he feels. Such a man needs to move beyond intellectual understanding to feel the pain of his friends as if it were his own. He can only do this by opening up to his own layers of grief and trauma.

These moments are not mere interpersonal friction; they are the manifestations of unhealed racial and class trauma. They are why, despite our best intentions, our coalitions fracture. Why, for example, the #MeToo movement fractured under accusations of racial bias.

Unaddressed trauma — the wild inner impulses of wrath and grief — does not vanish by suppression or avoidance. This pain can only begin to transform when it is wisely witnessed with love by our own selves and fellow human beings. By shining a light on emotions and experiences that feel neglected and shameful, we can begin to heal and move towards deeper solidarity with one another.
How can we face this trauma?

Modern psychotherapy could be a good starting point for different kinds of activist groups. But we do not have enough well-trained and affordable therapists to confront the scale of trauma we are facing.

Many ancient healing lineages, including Indigenous and Eastern spiritualities, have also been offering us pathways for healing. In contrast to the individualist approaches common in Western healing, these approaches emphasize the creation of belonging with one’s community and the Earth itself. Modern spiritual leaders like Joanna Macy have curated pathways for healing collective ecological trauma, drawing on some of these ancient lineages. Some younger and people of color leaders are creating new integrated practices that address other kinds of trauma from both modern psychological and ancient spiritual community-based frameworks (search for facilitators here).

Healing is, of course, not easy — it’s full of pitfalls, but it cannot be bypassed. Our mass movement must admit that a general strike can only succeed if we face our traumas head-on.

As we prepare to engage in nonviolent struggle, we must also learn to care for each other. This is the quiet, unglamorous work of our time. We must slow down to build the relational fabric for true mutual aid that will make any future strike not merely possible, but unshakable.




Sahaja Serpent

Sahaja Serpent is a contemplative practitioner and ecological science educator based in Tibet. She works at the intersection of contemplative practice and social change, mentoring activists in trauma-informed movement building. She facilitates retreats and workshops that integrate embodied trauma healing practices, community dialogue, and discussion of ethics. She can be reached at sahajaserpent@proton.me

What is Syndicalism And What is it Good For?

By Rasmus Hästbacka

March 5, 2026

Source: Class Autonomy

Image: SAC Congress 2018, via https://libcom.org/article/new-declaration-principles-swedish-syndicalists-proposal-umea-local-sac

Syndicalism has emerged from class struggle. It is an international trade union movement that first arose in the 1870s in Spain, the USA, Mexico, and Cuba, and in time broke forth on all continents. SAC – the Central Organization of Workers in Sweden – was founded in 1910.

SAC is built on Local chapters open to workers in all industries, abbreviated Locals (or just LS). Several members at a workplace form a section. Several sections in the same industry in a locality form a syndicate, an industrial branch. All branches in an industry form a nationwide federation.

Syndicalists have drawn certain conclusions from class struggle about how this struggle can best be waged. These conclusions have become guiding ideas for our union work. I intend to highlight six ideas and give examples of their practical usefulness.

The syndicalist and sex educator Elise Ottesen‑Jensen, known as “Ottar”. As early as the 1920s, Ottar emphasized that labor movements cannot achieve the liberation of humanity until trade unions break their internal male dominance. Photo: the newspaper Arbetaren

Union democracy

The first guiding idea is union democracy. For syndicalists, the guiding star is that everyone affected by decisions should have the right to influence those decisions. We practice what we call base democracy. It’s a combination of direct democracy and representative democracy.

To understand how this works in union practice, we can look at syndicalist operating sections, our job branches. They are called operating sections because the long‑term vision is for workers to take over the operation of workplaces. Syndicalists often use the shorter term section.

In the section, the member base makes decisions, while elected representatives implement decisions – or at least ensure that decisions are implemented. Elected representatives also have the task of coordinating union activity and making decisions on urgent or less important matters.

The section’s member meetings elect representatives and give them directives. This means that decisions on union demands, decisions on industrial action and decisions to reach agreements with employers are made by the member base – unless the base has delegated certain decision‑making power to representatives.

The section’s member meetings and elected representatives make majority decisions that are binding on all members. Representatives are accountable to the member meetings and can be removed at any time by these meetings. Member meetings can also overturn decisions taken by representatives.

Recent strikes

To see the value of democracy in sections, we can relate it to strikes and other forms of industrial action. Thanks to being members of a syndicalist section, Swedish workers can decide on and carry out lawful industrial action. In most other Swedish unions, the bylaws state that the member base has no right to participate in decisions about industrial action.

Two years ago, a syndicalist section went on strike twice to demand its own collective agreement. This was the section at the MediCarrier healthcare warehouse within the Stockholm Region. The purpose was, among other things, to challenge unfair wage‑setting and gain the right to appoint health and safety delegates.

In the first strike, the company brought in strikebreakers from staffing agencies. In the second strike, the company and the section accepted a compromise. The compromise was that all workers receive double pay on public holidays. It was a small but important partial victory and a point of departure for continuing the struggle.

If the workers had been members of a bureaucratic mainstream union and wanted to strike lawfully, they would have had to wait for a decision by the national union board. That often means waiting in vain.

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The section at MediCarrier / Photo: Arbetaren
https://www.arbetaren.se/2024/12/17/medicarrier-strejken-avblast/

https://www.nyhetsbyranjarva.se/syndikalistiska-arbetare-strejkar-i-spanga/

Democracy in negotiations

Union democracy also has great value in negotiations. In the autumn of 2021, Polish cleaners in Gothenburg went on strike at a company then called Perfect Maid. In negotiations, the cleaners won higher wages for everyone, they won pay also for the time spent driving company vehicles between different customer sites, and the right to use the vehicles to and from work.

I and local negotiators from Gothenburg LS participated as advisers, but it wasn’t we who made the decisions. It was the collective of cleaners who decided to strike and then sign agreements with the employer.

Solidarity

The next guiding idea is solidarity. Solidarity can be described as workers’ common struggle for common interests. It is mutual aid for mutual benefit. Co‑workers simply benefit from supporting each other against management.

Precisely because solidarity is fundamental, our sections are open to all employees except managers. Our syndicates (industrial branches) welcome everyone within a certain industry as members. Our LS welcome workers in all industries in a given locality.

An extension of solidarity is that syndicalists who are active in a section work on dual tracks at the same time. This means syndicalists promote cohesion both within the group of syndicalists and the workforce as a whole. The first is cohesion within the section, while the other can be described as cross‑union unity.

An example of a section that has successfully worked on dual tracks is the above‑mentioned section at MediCarrier. The section has not recruited a majority of the workforce, but syndicalists enjoy broad trust on the shop floor, and their mentioned struggle gave all workers better pay.

Wage-extraction blockades

By building a syndicate, solidarity can encompass workers at several workplaces. One example is the Construction Workers Syndicate within Stockholm LS (called Builders in Solidarity). One way to act as a syndicate is through so‑called wage‑extraction blockades. This is a type of industrial action.

When employers pay too little wages or no wages at all, Swedish unions have the right to use wage‑extraction blockades. In practice, these can consist of almost any kind of pressure and action. It is the purpose of recovering wage debts that makes it an extraction blockade. The Construction Workers Syndicate has used wage‑extraction blockades against many different employers, with good results.

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Builders in Solidarity / Photo: Arbetaren

https://laboursolidarity.org/en/n/3260/builders-in-solidarity-a-rambunctious-russian-speaking-union-shakes-up-swedens-labor-movement

Independence

The third guiding idea is independence – being a self‑governing trade union. Our sections, syndicates and LS have no loyalty ties to political parties, the state or business world. We safeguard our independence because it gives us great scope to conduct militant struggle.

It doesn’t matter whether you as a member vote left or right in parliamentary elections, or don’t vote at all. The crucial point is that you don’t bring party politics into the union. Party politics are kept outside the union.

Syndicalists don’t only build sections at workplaces but also cross‑union groups. These are groups of co‑workers who meet, regardless of union affiliation, to discuss and pursue common interests. In both sections and such groups, it is important to not get hung up on how co-workers vote.

Workers drove out the foreman

I will give an example of how a cross‑union group won a struggle without support from established unions. It happened at a pharmaceutical factory in the county of Västerbotten where I worked many years ago.

The head of the factory rewarded one of his friends by making the person a foreman in one department. The problem was that the foreman knew nothing about the work there, and the workers in the department had long worked without a foreman. So, when the foreman walked around bossing people around with an arrogant attitude, there was a clash.

The workers told both the foreman and the head of the factory that the foreman had to leave the department. The head responded by calling the workers in one by one for interrogations and scoldings. But they stood their ground, and the foreman eventually disappeared.

In this struggle, it was of course irrelevant which parties the workers voted for. They had a common interest in getting rid of the foreman and gaining more influence over their work. In working life, it may well be that the co‑workers you like the most vote for parties you think are absurd, while your worst bosses vote for your favorite party.

The dual function

The fourth syndicalist idea is that trade unions should fulfil a dual function. It’s described like this in SAC’s Declaration of principles, adopted in 2022:

“In the short term, the struggle through unions is about enforcing immediate improvements in living conditions: higher wages, reduced stress, shorter working hours, an end to sexual harassment, better balance between work and leisure time/family, etc. In the long term, trade unions are tools for democratizing workplaces and thereby building equal societies. The production of goods and services must be managed by us who do the work.”

Democracy at work is thus a prerequisite for egalitarian societies, what we call libertarian socialism. But are worker‑run workplaces enough to create an egalitarian society? No, this is commented on as follows in SAC’s Declaration of principles:

“Democracy in the workplace is a necessary precondition for a classless society, but not a sufficient condition for an equal society. An equal society presupposes that the social hierarchies based on gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and functional variation are also abolished.”

And furthermore:

“Democracy in the workplace means that the concentration of economic power is dissolved. The long-term vision of SAC is that the concentration of political power in state and supranational bodies should be dissolved as well. Power must be brought down to the people. Just as every workplace should be governed by the workforce, so too should every community be governed by the population.”

The dual function can be summarized with a metaphor: The union is not only a tool for winning a bigger piece of the pie we produce. It’s a tool for taking over the whole bakery.

Syndicalists want to see the entire economy under workers’ management.

Feminism

The fifth idea is feminism. SAC was the first trade union in Sweden to call itself feminist. This happened at SAC’s congress in 1994 by means of an addition to the Declaration of principles. Feminism was formulated there as an insight and a goal.

The insight concerns the fact that women as a group are subordinate and discriminated against in society. This applies to both cis women and trans women. Non‑binary people are likewise punished for deviations from prevailing gender norms.

SAC’s goal is simply to work for equality with a focus on the labor market and our own union. These are two parallel projects. We must break male dominance within the union to succeed in changing life in the workplaces.

By now, there is an enormous collection of facts about discrimination, for example at the Swedish Gender Equality Agency, Statistical Bureau and Discrimination Ombudsman. It’s not only the case that women as a group have lower wages and worse employment conditions than men. Women are assigned worse tasks – worse in the sense that the tasks are more monotonous, less autonomous, have lower status, and provide less satisfaction and development.

The pattern is also that workspaces, tools and work clothing are adapted to male bodies, not women’s bodies. In addition, women are targets of sexual harassment and sexual violence to a much greater extent than men.

So, what can be said about SAC’s feminist work? I will be honest and admit that we haven’t come very far yet. But there are certain initiatives within our union that have proven to bring results.

Gender power investigation

SAC released a Gender Power Investigation in 2010. The investigation highlighted the extent to which female members participate in union work. Women participate to a fairly large extent at workplaces (in sections), but much less at the syndicate and LS level, and even less at the central level.

The investigation identified causes of this. One cause is that women perform the majority of unpaid domestic work, which makes it difficult to engage in union activity in their free time. Another cause is the existence of so‑called homosociality within SAC. Homosociality means that men socialize with and promote each other while ignoring women (consciously or unconsciously).

Breaking the patterns

One way to break the pattern is to focus more on workplace organizing and starting sections. There, many women can get involved at work during working hours. One way to break homosociality is to have clear formal structures within the union. This involves being meticulous about bylaws, minuted decisions and up‑to‑date information to all members. A lack of formal structures allows informal structures to take over, and homosociality is an example of an informal structure.

Another initiative is to appoint nomination committees that call members and tip them about positions of trust, courses and conferences. The nomination committees are then active year‑round and prioritize women. This has been shown to increase the number of women in elected positions and the number of female participants in courses and conferences. When female leaders become visible, they give the union a face. This in turn inspires more women to get involved.

The same initiative can and should of course be done when it comes to non‑binary comrades. If the union gets more female and non‑binary leaders, they inspire more members to become active.

Organizing

I have touched on the following guiding stars: union democracy, solidarity, independence, the dual function and feminism. The best way to put these ideas into practice is to organize on the job. Organizing is not the same thing as recruiting members. Organizing is about workers developing and using their collective strength in a systematic way. Then we can speak of a fully-fledged syndicalist union.

Union democracy and solidarity is something we do, not something we have. Members need to meet and discuss common needs in working life, participate in decisions and carry out the decisions. Co‑workers need to stick together and act collectively. Union democracy and solidarity is a living practice, or it doesn’t exist.

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SAC union meeting

https://laboursolidarity.org/en/n/3260/builders-in-solidarity-a-rambunctious-russian-speaking-union-shakes-up-swedens-labor-movement

Our independence as a union gives us great room for maneuver, but to make use of the opportunities we must organize. To seize power in the workplaces, we must again organize. It is by building member‑run sections that workers can ultimately introduce staff‑run workplaces in all industries.

Feminism of course also depends on organizing. The feminist perspective needs to be brought into sections and cross‑union groups in order for feminism to produce results in workplaces. When the perspective is present at work and everyone feels welcome in the union community, the union becomes stronger and better at advancing the interests of all employees.

To summarize the guiding ideas of syndicalism in a single sentence, one can say thus: Unions must be run by the workers in order to be run for the workers.

If the working class doesn’t have power over its own unions, it’s impossible for workers to use unions to seize power over the economy. Then unions will stand in the way as a roadblock.

The article was translated from Swedish

Justice for Alex Pretti A Nursing Union Responds

By Joanna Walsh

March 5, 2026

Vigil for Alex Pretti January 28, 2026 at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Washington, DC. Photo by Jason Gooljar, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The murder of Alex Pretti, a union nurse who worked in the ICU at a VA Hospital in Minneapolis, set off a wave of outrage across the country. While mass resistance to ICE has been forming across the country since the start of the second Trump administration, many potential allies in the fight, including unions, have been far too dormant in this regard, distracted and frozen by the onslaught of manufactured crises from the New Confederacy.

Something about the broad-daylight execution-style nature of Pretti’s killing tapped into a current of horrified energy that was waiting to be unleashed. As socialists working as staffers at a prominent nursing union, we immediately noticed a tangible shift in how everyone—staff, leadership, and rank and file members—was talking about ICE. A topic that had been previously seen as niche, or even taboo, suddenly became the main thing people were talking about.

We knew that we needed to capture the energy of this moment, and that we had an opportunity to mobilize our union to shift its orientation towards resistance to ICE.

The first thing we did was call an emergency meeting for all staff on Monday morning. For this, we did not ask for permission from union management, recognizing that because of the fire of the moment, we had a mandate to supersede management, who may have tried to quell or water down a response. A supermajority of staff, including many in administrative and non-organizing positions, attended the meeting. Some of the outcomes included forming several ad hoc groups to:

1. Partner with the existing ICE defense infrastructure in our state to put on healthcare-specific trainings for our members.
2. Push our local to donate thousands of dollars to immigrant defense organizations both in our own state and in Minnesota.
3. Create a rap of political education to be used by organizers in the field.

On the membership side, a few months before a Signal thread had been created between trusted, left members and staff. Using the Signal thread, some of the member activists began spontaneously organizing vigils across the state. These ended up being well attended, sites of connection, and necessary grieving for not just nurses, but other healthcare workers and working-class people looking for a place to be in community.

Then, using the sign-ins from these vigils as a starting point, the member activists began drafting a solidarity letter addressed to Alex Pretti’s family. There was some discussion about whether to have this be an informal letter, but we pushed to have the letter be sent to the board/elected leadership of the union for official approval. We identified that because of the level of mobilization and anger, even though we have plenty of ICE-supporting members who would be upset, we felt we had the power to push the board to make this letter an official union matter.

In this case, we were right—the board voted unanimously to endorse the letter, which allowed us to use union resources to send it to tens of thousands of union members across the state. Now, we can follow up with all signatories to plug them into ICE defense trainings, and continue to raise money and other resources for mutual aid projects.

We recognized that the killing of Alex Pretti was a trigger moment, and we couldn’t wait to let neoliberal elements of union leadership co-opt a response. We identified some of the available infrastructure we had to mobilize—calling an emergency staff meeting, communicating on the activist Signal thread, etc.—and pushed for material shifts in union resources, which have re-oriented the priorities of our union since.

Every union and community can expect to have an event that triggers exceptional outrage and shock. We cannot control what these events are, nor anticipate when they will arrive, but it’s our job as organizers to pay attention to the way moods shift on the shop floor, and be ready to contest for power.Email

Joanna Walsh

Joanna Walsh is a queer, Jewish organizer and writer, who has worked for a decade as a union organizer and across social movements. They wrote this article along with a fellow nurse and organizer.

 

Israel’s War of Regional Supremacy Will Not End With Iran

If Netanyahu is successful in crushing the Islamic Republic, his violent expansionist vision will turn towards Arab Gulf states next

By David Hearst

March 4, 2026

Source: Middle East Eye

Israeli army tank deploys near the Gaza border, May 20, 2025. (Photo: © Saeed Qaq/ZUMA Press Wire/ZUMA Wire/APA Images)

Israelis and some in the Iranian diaspora celebrated when the first blow in the third Gulf war was struck early on Saturday morning, as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of other military and political leaders were wiped out.

The Iranian delegations at the talks in Geneva and Oman had just made a substantial offer, according to the chief negotiator, Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi. It was to dilute Iran’s entire stock of highly enriched uranium, with independent verification, thus making it unusable as bomb material. 

US President Donald Trump responded with war.

The talks had been a sham all along, just as they had been last June, when the US and Israel attacked Iran for the first time. 

The CIA had been tracking Khamenei’s movements for months, and the operation had been waiting for the moment when Iran’s top leadership was gathered. On Saturday, it came in two meetings in adjacent buildings – and Israel struck.

As if speaking from the same script, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to take to the streets and rise up against the regime, as they had attempted to do in January. 

But that is not what happened. Within a couple of hours, Iran had replied with its first barrage of missiles.

When confirmation of Khamenei’s death came through, Iranians did take to the streets, but they were full of mourners. 

There were neighbourhoods of Tehran like Ekbatan, where people cheered from the relative anonymity of their apartments. But there were screams in other parts of Tehran, and plenty who did neither, but feared what was to come.

Regime change

From the first moments it became clear that this war was about regime change, not about Iran’s uranium enrichment or its missiles. 

Regime change was the very thing that Trump and the entire Maga movement campaigned against, both before he was elected president for the second time and afterwards.

As a presidential candidate at a speech in Derry, New Hampshire, in 2023, Trump vowed: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers, those horrible warmongers, from our government – those stupid, stupid people. They love seeing people die. We will drive out the globalists.”

As president, Trump said in Riyadh last May: “The so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built – and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

What Netanyahu has in mind is the destruction of Iran as a regional power. Liberation from autocracy is far down on his to-do list

Now that he has started a major war in the Gulf, he is hard put to explain why. He has cited Iran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, help for the protesters, and regime change.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio added a fifth reason, claiming that the US attack was pre-emptive. The US attacked because it knew Israel was poised to attack, and if that happened, the US would bear the brunt of the retaliation. 

Was Rubio thus admitting that his commander in chief was led by the nose by Israel into a full-blown Gulf war? Trump sought to dispel the notion on Tuesday, telling reporters at the White House that “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand”.

Regardless, Netanyahu has been much more consistent about his desire to deal Iran, which he has called Amalek, a crippling blow.

He has been praying for this day for the better part of 47 years. As prime minister, then as opposition outcast (when I first talked to him), then as prime minister again, he has tried repeatedly to get his military and the US to mount an attack like the one which was launched on Saturday morning, but was rebuffed several times. 

Not a time-limited strike, as happened last June, but an all-out war to topple the Islamic Republic.

Dismantling Iran

In his speech on Saturday, Netanyahu was clear about Israel’s strategy. He pointedly addressed Iranians by their ethnicities, not their nationality: “Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Balochs, Ahwazis, and all other citizens of this wonderful nation”. 

The bombs that had already fallen by then spoke to the same strategy. They targeted all currents of the Iranian political elite – reformists, leftists, past presidents, as well as the principlists.

Neither Netanyahu’s words nor his actions were aimed at building a new elite that could take over after the fall of the Islamic Republic. Both were intended to permanently disable Iran by turning it into a weak confederation of ethnic cantons, just as Israel has tried, and so far failed, to do in Syria.

“Take your destiny into your own hands,” Netanyahu said. “Hold your head high, look to the skies; our forces are there, the pilots of the free world, all coming to your aid. Help has arrived.”

Instead, Iranian citizens have seen the pilots of the free world bombing a school and killing 180 people, most of them young girls and boys, while also attacking hospitals and most major cities. 

Israel is setting about dismantling the cities of Iran in the same way that it has levelled Gaza, or parts of southern Lebanon and Beirut. As a consequence, the casualties of “pinpoint” bombing have soared to more than 750 deaths in Iran in just four days.

What Netanyahu has in mind is the destruction of Iran as a regional power. 

Liberation from autocracy is far down on his to-do list. There has been no postwar planning. Minimal thought has been given to what sort of regime could replace the Islamic Republic if it falls, and what real popularity or following any Iranian political figure or movement in the diaspora has inside the country itself. 

The destruction of Iran as a regional power is part of a bigger plan that would accommodate and sustain two words increasingly on the lips of Israeli leaders of all political shades: Greater Israel.

Alliance with India

It is no coincidence that in the immediate run-up to this attack, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said to Tucker Carlson that it would be fine if Israel took all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. Or that Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, immediately agreed. 

“I support anything that will allow the Jews a large, broad, strong land and a safe haven for us, our children and our children’s children. That I support,” Lapid told a Kipa News reporter, noting that Israeli territory could expand as far as Iraq.

It is also no coincidence that shortly before launching this war, Netanyahu rolled out the red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

This is the dream that Zionists of many hues have harboured for decades: that Israel will one day run from the Nile to the Euphrates

My colleague and author of Hostile Homelands, Azad Essa, says that Delhi has emerged as Israel’s strongest non-western ally. “There is strategic cooperation and ideological convergence between the two, which actually strengthened during the course of [the Gaza] genocide,” Essa said, noting that on his recent visit, Modi promised to allow 50,000 more Indian citizens to work in Israel in the coming years.

“India would bring a combination of economic scale, market access, labour, and technological expertise to such an alliance. In many ways it already has,” he added. “India is already co-producing weapons with Israel, meaning that it is being primed to become a factory for Israel. India will therefore back up Israeli shortfalls and become a form of labour replacement for Palestinians.” 

The second point about this war is its timing.

Netanyahu calculates correctly that Israel will never again have a US president as pliant and easy to manipulate as Trump. No Republican or Democrat will ever be as friendly to Israel as Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have been. The genocide in Gaza has seen to that.

But Trump’s second term has already gifted Israel a prize of much higher value than the US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, or the annexation of the Golan Heights, the gifts of his first term. Trump has now gifted Israel Washington’s blessing to expand its borders to any land it can control, whether in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or Egypt. 

This is the dream that Zionists of many hues have harboured for decades: that Israel will one day run from the Nile to the Euphrates.

New reality

This is thus the time not just to crush the Islamic Republic and shatter its regional network into shards, but to use this vacuum to expand Israel’s control over the region as a whole.

Iran as a regional power is the last and only obstacle to Netanyahu realising his dream of expanding Israel’s borders and establishing a new international alliance – his so-called hexagon of states – with India as its eastern wing, and Somaliland as its southern tip. 

This alliance would underpin Israel’s position as the regional military hegemon, with air bases all over the region. The major Arab states whose support for Israel will never happen without a Palestinian state would be forced to accept a new reality: a diminution of their territory and sovereignty, as in Syria today and Lebanon tomorrow.

With support from India in place, Israel would become less dependent on its umbilical cord of funding, arms and political support from Washington. The future of this relationship is in any event far from guaranteed, if US opinion polls are any guide.

Israel knows that the Gaza genocide has destroyed its image as a noble project in the West. The war against Iran is its insurance policy.

The Islamic Republic is now fighting for its life. Its leadership, so often dubbed fundamentalist and reckless, has in reality been far too cautious. 

It has realised too late in the day that the war of total annihilation Israel has been waging in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria would arrive on its doorstep. It got suckered into negotiations twice, and each time, the US treated the talks as cover for a military decapitation campaign.

Fatal mistake

Iran’s predicament goes all the way back to how it reacted to the events of 7 October 2023. Iran and Hezbollah’s immediate reaction was to reject the Qassam Brigades’ pleas to infiltrate Israel from the north and start a simultaneous second front. 

October 7 was conceived not as a limited campaign to strike an army base in the south, but as the start of a war of liberation. When both Hezbollah and Iran initially refused to get involved, each allowed themselves to be picked off one by one by Israel. 

Iran made the fatal mistake of listening to the messaging it and Hezbollah were getting from the Biden administration. It took time for him to react, but when he did, the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the 7 October attacks by Hamas a “100 percent Palestinian operation”, noting that neither his organisation nor Iran was aware of what was coming: “It has no relation to any regional or international issues.”

By the time he spoke, Hezbollah had already lost 57 men in border exchanges, so it was not doing nothing. But it allowed itself to be gradually sucked into a war of Israel’s timing. Thus Hamas, Hezbollah and now Iran have all been picked off in turn. None of them acted in conjunction with each other.

Belatedly, Iran has learned these lessons. It is now waging a different campaign to the one it fought during 12 days last June.

Then, it concentrated all of its firepower in salvos of rockets towards Israel. Today, Iran’s main targets are the US and its allies in the Gulf.

As the Iranian commentator Trita Parsi posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Tehran has concluded that Israel’s pain tolerance is very high – as long as the US stays in the war. So the focus shifts to the US … Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran’s past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the US in a direct war,” he noted.

“Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite – despite the massive cost it itself will pay. Ironically, the assassination of Khamenei facilitated this shift.”

Heavy price

So within 24 hours, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, pounded Dubai, halted Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil refinery and Doha’s production and export of liquefied natural gas. Ships at the mouth of the Gulf are aflame. Most flights have been suspended. Oil and gas prices have surged.

Iranian drones have also targeted a French military base in Abu Dhabi and the British Royal Air Force base Akrotiri in Cyprus. Iran seeks to internationalise Trump’s attack by making it as expensive as possible for the global economy.

If Iran folds, then we can be sure of the devastating consequences across the Gulf. A civil war in Iran has the capacity to send millions of refugees westwards

Under heavy and sustained fire, the Gulf states have – so far at least – avoided escalation. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman had been warning Trump for months not to strike Iran. He ignored their advice, and now they are paying a heavy price. 

When US Senator Lindsey Graham boasted that he had got Mohammed bin Salman “on board” for an attack on Iran, the Saudi crown prince was in fact doing the opposite. He told his Gulf neighbours to avoid taking any steps that could trigger a response by Tehran or its proxies and push the region towards a broader conflict. 

Riyadh has good reasons for caution. It has maintained a ceasefire with the Houthis in northern Yemen, and they have yet to get seriously involved.

But even after the US bombing campaign last year, the Houthis remain a fighting force, armed with missiles with ranges of 2,000 kilometres and aerial drones with ranges of up to 2,500 kilometres. 

So, too, are the Iraqi militias: it was from their territory that drones were launched at Aramco’s oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia in 2019. 

Redrawing the map

How long the Gulf states can maintain this position is doubtful, as Iran is pushing the whole of the Gulf Cooperation Council up the escalation ladder.

There are two main scenarios now for Iran. Either the US-Israeli bombing campaign will engineer a total collapse of command and control, and the regime will fall – or the regime will retain control and steer the war successfully to a ceasefire. 

The killing of Khamenei during Ramadan could in fact be the spark that rejuvenates the Iranian revolution, giving it new purpose. This in itself would constitute victory – because Iran knows that the weak link in this war is Trump himself.

If Iran continues the war for long enough, it will negatively impact Trump within his Maga constituency. It will expose the truth that Israel drafted Trump into a war that neither his backers, nor the US, needed.

But if Iran folds, then we can be sure of the devastating consequences across the Gulf. A civil war in Iran has the capacity to send millions of refugees westwards. 

Nor will Netanyahu’s war have ended. Israel is betting on the weakness of the Arab states to defend themselves, and is seeking to weaken them further. 

For it is only around the contours of a weakened neighbourhood that Israel can redraw the map of the Middle East and institute a new Sykes-Picot. 

Then, it is only a matter of time before Netanyahu declares Turkey to be Israel’s next Amalek.

Escalation of This War Could Shatter Iran into Ethnic Enclaves

By Zoltan Grossman

March 3, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Zoltán Grossman of antiwar rally in Olympia, Washington, with mock headstones representing Middle East interventions since 1953

As a political-cultural geographer who has long been an antiwar organizer and studied the history of U.S. military interventions, it’s clear that the war on Iran could set into motion a regional conflagration, the violent break-up of Iran into ethnic enclaves, and a toll that would make the Iraq War look like a warm-up exercise.

The U.S. role in the Mideast began with the 1953 CIA coup that toppled a democratically elected government that had nationalized the oil industry for the benefit of its people, replacing him with the dictatorial monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom the U.S. backed with both weapons and nuclear technology. It’s in Iran that the U.S. regional domination began, and where it might confront the hardest obstacles, at home and abroad.

Most Americans concur with the country singer Alan Jackson, who sang in 2002, “I’m not a real political man… I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran.” But Iran has always been more geographically pivotal than Iraq, in land area, population, and economics. It was one of the few countries that retained independence through the colonial era, and one of the only Third World societies to keep control of its own resources.

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and seizure of hostages in the U.S. Embassy, Washington has sought to topple the Shi’a revolutionary government in Tehran. That moment was when the demonization of Muslims replaced anti-Communism as the main selling point for military interventions. I remember seeing U.S. sailors in the Philippines 40 years ago sporting t-shirts that read “I Got My Tan off the Coast of Iran,” and a string of U.S. bases with 40,000 troops has encircled Iran since then, now in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Oman (all but the last two are now under Iranian missile retaliation).

The U.S. has already been at war with Iran, during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1987-88, the U.S. Navy actively sided with Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, by escorting tankers carrying Iraqi oil, attacking Iranian boats and oil rigs, and “accidentally” shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner. This war with Iran is continuation of a long-simmering conflict.

U.S. and Israeli threats have also encouraged a siege mentality among Iranian leaders, who repeatedly used them as a rationale for cracking down on internal dissent. The hardliners in Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran have always reinforced and fed off of each other, and to create fear to build their own internal power and legitimacy.

Trump and Netanyahu may have thought the Sunni Gulf States, which have long been at odds with Iran, and the Iranian people would side with their current drive toward regime change. But it has had the exact opposite effect last year, causing stronger Muslim solidarity and rallying Iranians around the flag, even many who had protested and been imprisoned by the ayatollahs but don’t want a new Shah or other foreign puppet ruler. Much the same happened in Germany in World War II, when Allied fire-bombings that targeted civilian neighborhoods may have prevented internal dissent from growing.

Escalation beyond air war

Both the Iraq and Iran wars were justified with lies about weapons of mass destruction, lies told by the nuclear-armed states of the U.S. and Israel. But attacking Iran is far more disastrous than attacking Iraq. It will scuttle any chance of political reforms in Iran or regional agreement around Palestine. Iranian forces could block global oil lanes in the narrow Strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint, clash with U.S. naval forces in the Gulf, or melt into an insurgency far deeper and longer than in Iraq. Trump’s War will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it could stimulate the terrorism and weapons programs it claims to oppose. If Russia takes the unlikely step of getting involved, it could even lead to World War III.

Yet in four decades of conflict, Iran has never sponsored an attack within the U.S., even as the U.S. has attacked its allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and directly attacked its own forces in the Gulf. Only Sunni terrorists (also opposed by Iran) have attacked targets in the U.S.

All our recent wars, such as in Iraq, began as bombing campaigns, but as they met resistance or retaliation, led to boots on the ground. Unlike Iraq, the U.S. has limited options to invade Iran. Iraq had largely flat terrain, and so has been repeatedly invaded by foreign armies. Iran has natural defensive barriers in its mountain ranges, and a political advantage in having complex neighbors that may not be willing to host invading forces.

Part of the neoconservative agenda for occupying Iraq was to have a staging area for regime change in Iran, but that is no longer possible. Ground forces invading Iran from Kuwait would have to pass through a slice of Iraqi Shi’a territory. An invasion from Pakistan or Turkey would be politically untenable.

These limited options means that a U.S. ground invasion of Iran is very unlikely, so there would not be a repeat of the 2003 Iraq invasion, followed by an occupation of the entire country. That’s why it may be dangerous for the antiwar movement to warn that an Iran War would be a repeat of the Iraq War, with massive U.S. casualties and a legacy of combat injuries and PTSD. During the Vietnam War, facing huge protests because of bodybags coming home, President Nixon switched from a ground war to an air war, reducing U.S. troop casualties, but vastly increasing civilian casualties. Already, reports are that an Israeli strike on a girls’ school has claimed at least 165 lives.

President Bush employed a similar strategy in the 1991 Gulf War, sanitizing air strikes on Iraq as a detached video game. Clinton’s 1999 air war on Serbia and Obama’s 2011 air war on Libya were the first time in human history that a one side in a major war had zero deaths by enemy fire. Trump has inherited these technological tactics of imperial impunity. If the antiwar movement mainly emphasizes the possibilities of U.S. military casualties, it only plays into the Pentagon’s hands and reinforces high-tech warfare that claims even more civilian lives.

Ethnic divisions for an oil grab

But there is one scenario that I fear could lead to boots on the ground in Iran. Watch for the U.S. and Israel again stoking ethnic divisions in the diverse country, where ethnic minorities form more than 40 percent of the population, such as Azeris and Kurds in the northwest, Baluchis in the southeast, and Ahwazi Arabs in the southwest, who have been oppressed by both the Shah and Ayatollahs. The most dangerous sign would be encouraging a rebellion in the province of Khuzestan, called “Al Ahwaz” by its Arab inhabitants.

Netanyahu today exclaimed, “The time has come for all segments of the Iranian people – the Persians, the Kurds, the Azeris, the Baluchis, and the Ahwazis – to throw off the yoke of tyranny and bring about a free and peaceful Iran.” Yet at the same time, Israel backs the Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi as a future ruler, who would not be welcome by the ethnic minorities that his father severely repressed, nor by most Persians living in Iran.

Two decades ago I wrote about the possibility that the U.S. would use an uprising as an excuse to occupy Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province (next to southern Iraq), with a so-called “humanitarian” rationale of protecting its ethnic Arab population from “ethnic cleansing.” Instead of occupying all of Iran, U.S.-allied forces could take control of the plains of western Khuzestan, where about 85% of Iran’s crude oil deposits are present, and hold the oil industry hostage for its demands.

The Arab Shi’as living on the plains of western Khuzestan share both their ethnicity and faith with the Arab Shi’as across the strategic Shatt al-Arab waterway in Iraq. Arabs make up only 3% of Iran’s population, but a plurality of about 3 million in Khuzestan.  In 1897, the British Empire backed Ahwazi Arab rulers to secede from Persia and become the de facto British protectorate of “Arabistan” (much as the British did in neighboring Kuwait). The southern zone of Persia was declared a British “sphere of influence” in 1907, and the following year a British adventurer discovered oil at Masjed Soleyman in “Arabistan.” The discovery created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed British Petroleum (BP). In 1925, Reza Shah’s forces retook “Arabistan,” and renamed it Khuzestan, as he renamed “Persia” as Iran a decade later.

British troops occupied Khuzestan during World War II, but after the war Iranians grew more concerned that Westerners had a stranglehold on their oil wealth. In 1951, the Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry based mainly in Khuzestan (including Anglo-Iranian’s holdings), resulting in the 1953 coup that installed the Shah. 

In 1978, Arab oil workers in Khuzestan went on strike against the Shah, and played a central role in the Iranian Revolution that toppled him the following year. They supported the revolution in its early months, when it included leftist and other secular parties (that were later crushed by the Islamic Republic). Encouraged by Western powers that were threatened by the revolution, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal invasion of Khuzestan in 1980, and occupied its western Arab oil region. He tried to engineer the secession of the province from Iran, and backed an Arab separatist rebel group (which also briefly seized the Iranian Embassy in London).

Yet in the Iran-Iraq War, most Iranian Arab Shi’ites fought on the side of Persian-ruled Iran, just as Iraqi Arab Shi’as fought on the side of Saddam’s Sunni-ruled Iraq. State territoriality trumped both ethnic and religious territoriality, in a massive slaughter. Iranian forces pushed the Iraqis out of Khuzestan in 1982, but the province’s cities and oil refineries were the most heavily damaged in the war, that finally ended in 1988.

My color map makes it clear that Khuzestan contains Iran’s largest oil reserves. In a 2008 New Yorker article, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed CIA assistance to Ahwazi Arab and other ethnic insurgents, later advocated by John Bolton, and a CIA analysis declassified in 2013 referred to Khuzestan as “Iran’s Achilles Tendon.” Tehran’s repression of Ahwazi Arab rights protests and separatist attacks stepped up in 2005, 2011, and 2018, and have recently been increasing again, so the possibility again exists of the U.S. exploiting their legitimate grievances for its own interests. The ethnic break-up of Iran would make the 1990s shattering of Yugoslavia into seven countries look like a cake walk, and would unleash regional violence that would reverberate for decades.

Map of western Iran ethnic groups and oil fields by Zoltán Grossman

Even if ethnic minority grievances against Persian rule are legitimate, the timing of western interest in their grievances coincides too neatly with the larger desire to pressure and isolate Iran. Washington has a long history of championing the rights of ethnic minorities against its enemies (such as in Montagnards in Vietnam, Hmong in Laos, Miskitus in Nicaragua, and most recently Kurds in Syria), then abandoning or selling out the minority when it is no longer strategically useful. We love ‘em, we use ‘em, and then we dump ‘em.

Stopping this war

On one hand, Netanyahu pressured Trump on the timing of this particular attack. Netanyahu needs to avoid prosecution and feared the stability of an Iran nuclear deal, just as Trump needs this war to divert attention from the Epstein files. But on the other hand, Israel has always served as a U.S. aircraft carrier carrying out U.S. aims of controlling the economy of the oil-rich Middle East, doing our dirty work of preventing and crushing revolt. 

The American public has developed a healthy “Iraq Syndrome” that abhors endless wars, much as the “Vietnam Syndrome” temporarily scaled back U.S. military interventions. Even though Iran is very different from Iraq, that strong public sentiment previously prevented both Obama and Trump from attacking Iran. This war is less popular than even the 12-day war last year, across the political spectrum.

This time, a clear majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents felt we should have stayed out of this war, so we start with far stronger support than in any war in living memory. At the same time, a clear majority opposes sending ICE and soldiers into our cities. The growing high school walkouts opposing the war at home could incorporate military counterrecruitment to slow youth enlistment into wars abroad. We have a responsibility to support veterans in groups such as About Face and Veterans for Peace, who are telling the truth to military personnel and their families, and support military personnel on their inevitable grievances, and when they refuse illegal orders or quietly frustrate the expansion of wars at home and abroad.

But to be effective, the movement has to focus on the horrendous effects of such a war on civilians, and not only on U.S. troops. And it should understand that this war may unfold in unpredictable ways that differ from previous conflicts. Just as “generals always fight the last war,” antiwar movements will lose if we merely fight against the last war.

Just as the Iranian people have a long, proud history of fighting against monarchy and theocracy, Americans are now facing a new monarchy and new theocracy at the same time. We should understand that tyrants like Trump always turn to war abroad to crush internal dissent at home. He is joining with messianic fascist allies like Netanyahu and Putin to stoke a religious nationalist crusade that will bring only suffering to civilians abroad and repression at home. It’s not just the future of the Middle East that’s at stake, but our own future as a democracy. The old saying is that Truth is the First Casualty of War.  Now we can turn that around to say that war should become a casualty of the truths that we tell about our country, and at long last we need to pull back from dominating other peoples to take care of all people in our own country.Email

Zoltan Grossman

Zoltán Grossman is faculty in Geography and Native Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, studying and teaching about the intersections of ethnic-racial nationalism, militarism, and natural resources. He is author of Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands, and co-editor of Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis. His website is at https://sites.evergreen.edu/zoltan/.

War With Iran: Resist What?

By Michael Albert

March 4, 2026Z

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Phillip Pessar, Creative Commons 4.0

You get focused to resist and the target moves. It doesn’t just move. It morphs. Should you set aside one focus to pick up another? Or you get focused to resist and the target moves. It doesn’t just move, it morphs. Should you hang on to your valid, important focus and ignore distractions?

It is hard to play whack a mole with a morphing mole. Worse, it is self-defeating to do so. It is what Trump wants. As he moves chaotically he wants us to also move chaotically.

But, the new target, war on Iran, is so grotesque you might say that, “I must refocus. I must chart a new course.” Or, instead, you might say, “My old target is so grotesque. I must maintain my focus. I must maintain my course.”

And then you may say, “My head hurts and I feel so powerless.”

A simple truth, hard to abide, is that we need to see the forest, not just the trees. Yet, we also need to address the trees, not just the forest. What?

No Kings offered a possible answer. Focus on the orange one. He is the forest. Stick with that. The whole of it. But that has problems. 

First, the trees keep growing. Misogynist and racist slurs and violence. Executive orders destroying social programs. Tariffs taxing the poor. Arrests and deportations fascistically violating rights. Profit seeking growth trampling ecology. Voter suppressions entrenching authoritarianism. Wars killing, killing, killing. The carnage persists. Each mole is too big to be stopped by the subset of us that pick that mole to focus on. 

Second, if continuing as we are, we do remove Trump, ghost Trump, totally end Trump, we may sensibly celebrate that achievement but settle for pre-Trump business as usual. Back to an awful past. Back to the future. 

So how do we unify to be sufficiently strong against the whole forest, yet also diversify to be strong against the trees? And how do we defeat Trump to roll back Trumpian fascism but also persist beyond Trump to win a new society?

There are big questions which, however, we ought not put off answering until it is too late for our answers to matter. Beyond No Kings, what is we do a little of our own morphing? Beyond No Kings, how about if our touchstone is no polity punishing people. No economy erasing people. No families fracturing people. No schools stultifying people. No health care harming people. No countries crushing people. One big movement. And how about that that movement has parts, of course, that focus mainly on Trump’s morphing moles, but where each such part emotionally and materially supports all the other parts? Anti-ICE supports anti-tariff. Anti-tariff supports anti-misogyny. Anti-misogyny supports anti-censorship. Anti-censorship supports anti-big pharmaceutical. Anti-big pharmaceutical supports anti-war. And so on. All of them and more form a circular mutual aid relationship. And all of them emphasize the positive—not only what they are against, but that they want. Not just anti but also pro. One big movement of mutually supportive movements. 

Might those steps end Trump, advance many entwined agendas, and also continue on beyond all that to keep on pushing to end racism, sexism, authoritarianism, classism, ecological insanity, and war in all its forms?

Might to attain one big movement of mutually supportive movements be a convincing answer to the big questions? Might we then unify and also diversify consistent with whacking the many moles, removing the mole master, and also producing instead of pre-Trump business as usual, a new world that is both possible and worthy?Email

Michael Albert

Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.