These two short essaylets by Sirantos Fotopoulos are probably the sharpest, densest commentaries I’ve seen yet on Israel and Iran. I know nothing about him except a few short bios. Triple Ampersand says he’s a “political activist based near Seattle, Washington and has worked on a variety of political campaigns over the past 20 years including with Ralph Nader and current Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson. He regularly posts at: facebook.com/sirantos.fotopoulos.” What. a. gift.
(1) 15 March 2026
There are two ways to make a population disappear from political discourse, and the Western anti-imperialist Left has, with a consistency that cannot entirely be attributed to accident, managed to deploy both of them simultaneously against the people of Iran. The first is the campist method: you absorb the country into a geopolitical schema so totalising that its actual inhabitants — their strikes, their insurrections, their feminist movements, their dead — become noise in a signal about imperial rivalry, inconvenient data points that complicate the preferred conclusion and are therefore, with a discipline that any intelligence agency might envy, quietly omitted. The second is the liberal method: you make the suffering so visible, so aestheticised, so available for consumption as a spectacle of violated humanity, that the people doing the suffering are transformed from political agents with demands and analyses and a specific class position into a kind of permanent victim-class, objects of indignation rather than subjects of history, whose liberation is always being prepared by someone else and perpetually deferred. Both methods arrive, by different routes and with different vocabularies, at the same destination: a politics in which the Iranian working class and feminist movement cannot appear as what they actually are — the protagonists of their own emancipation, in direct and chosen antagonism with a specific capitalist state formation, requiring from their allies not pity and not geopolitical calculation but the elementary recognition that their struggle is real, their analysis is serious, and their dead deserve to be counted.
This is a failure of political legibility — and that failure is not incidental to the theoretical traditions I am examining but structural, load-bearing, produced with something approaching deliberate craft. A framework that cannot integrate rights discourse with class analysis cannot see an uprising whole. It sees either a human rights violation — which is the liberal register, innocent of class, innocent of the question of whose interests the repressive apparatus serves, whose accumulation it protects — or it sees a geopolitical maneuver, a piece repositioned on the board of imperial rivalry, whose relationship to the actual human beings conducting it is treated as essentially incidental, a matter of atmospherics rather than substance. What it cannot see, in either mode, is the thing that is actually there: a working-class and a feminist movement in direct, chosen, conscious antagonism with a specific capitalist state formation, demanding simultaneously the end of theocratic repression and the transformation of the class relations the theocracy was constructed to protect. This is not a complicated thing to see. It requires only that one look — and that one be willing to accept what looking reveals.
Nicos Poulantzas developed an account of the capitalist state not as a unified instrument of class will descending from above, not as a simple executive committee managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie, but as a condensation of class forces — a terrain of struggle on which different fractions of capital and different class alliances produce, at each conjuncture, the specific form of state power that corresponds to their relative strength and their specific accumulation requirements. The state, in his analysis, is not a thing that a class possesses. It is a relation — a crystallisation of the balance of forces at a given historical moment, traversed by contradictions, capable of producing outcomes that no single class fully intended and that can only be explained by examining the specific configuration of forces that produced them. This is a theoretical instrument of considerable practical consequence, and its consequences are as uncomfortable for the campist Left as for the liberal rights tradition, which is perhaps why both have preferred to ignore it.
For what Poulantzas makes immediately and irrefutably visible is that you cannot read a state’s relationship to the classes it governs from its geopolitical alignment alone. A state’s posture toward American hegemony tells you something about one dimension of its existence — its position in the global system, the specific fractions of capital whose interests are served by that posture — but it tells you nothing necessary, nothing logically entailed, about its relationship to the workers and women and political dissidents living under its authority. The Revolutionary Guards simultaneously resist American hegemony in the region and operate one of the most significant accumulation regimes in Iranian economic life, extracting surplus from industries spanning construction, telecommunications, energy, and finance, disciplines that surplus through the suppression of independent labour organisation, and uses the apparatus of the state to protect that extraction from challenge. The Bonyad networks — massive, state-affiliated foundations in Iran, controlling roughly 20% of the country’s GDP — simultaneously represent a form of anti-Western economic nationalism and function as instruments of patronage, extraction, and the systematic disciplining of class forces that might otherwise cohere into an organised challenge to the existing order. These are not contradictions requiring explanation. They are, on the Poulantzian analysis, precisely what you would expect: the unified expression of a specific class formation whose interests include both the maintenance of geopolitical sovereignty against external pressure and the suppression of the Iranian working class’s capacity for autonomous political action against internal challenge. To treat the anti-imperial posture as evidence of progressive class character is not an error of emphasis. It is a categorical confusion — the conflation of two independent variables that Poulantzas demonstrated were independent.
But it is precisely here that the liberal rights tradition must also be brought before the same analytical tribunal, because it arrives with its own evasions, and those evasions are, if anything, more difficult to dislodge because they wear the costume of moral seriousness. The liberal human rights framework — the framework of reports and resolutions and special rapporteurs and solemn declarations — is, on the Poulantzian analysis, a politics that has systematically refused to ask the most important question available to it. It can register, with admirable precision and genuine moral courage, the torture in the cells of Evin Prison. It can document the floggings, catalogue the executions, name the prisoners, count the dead. And then, having done all of this, it arrives at conclusions about individual violations and institutional remedies that leave entirely intact the class relations that produced the prison, the accumulation regime the prison protects, and the condensation of class forces that makes the Islamic Republic’s specific form of state violence not an aberration but a structural necessity. A rights politics that cannot ask — in Poulantzas’s terms — which class forces are condensed in the repressive apparatus, which fractions of capital require that apparatus to function as it does, and what transformation of the balance of class forces would be necessary to make it function differently, is a politics that can produce testimony but not transformation. And testimony, however necessary — however indispensable as a record of what was done and to whom — is not the same thing as a politics capable of ending what it describes.
The task, then, is not the synthesis that eclectics propose — not the genial combining of the two traditions in the hope that their respective blind spots will politely cancel each other out, that the class analyst and the human rights lawyer will pool their deficiencies and arrive at adequacy. It is something more rigorous and less comfortable: the recognition, forced by the Poulantzian analysis, that a rights politics without class analysis is systematically incapable of addressing the structural conditions that produce the violations it documents, and that a class analysis without rights discourse is systematically incapable of specifying the concrete harms inflicted on concrete bodies by the condensation of class forces it describes. The flogging of a dissident in an Iranian prison is simultaneously a rights violation that any adequate moral framework must register and a moment in the reproduction of a specific class relation — the enforcement of the Islamic Republic’s accumulation regime against those who challenge it — that any adequate political framework must analyse as such. Poulantzas gives you the second. He does not give you the first. The task is to insist on both, not by averaging them but by showing that each is incomplete without the other and that their integration produces an analysis qualitatively different from, and more adequate than, either tradition operating in isolation.
The concept I want to place at the center of this integrated framework is political legibility — the condition under which a social struggle becomes visible, nameable, and therefore claimable as an object of solidarity within a given political framework. Legibility, as I am using the term, is not empirical visibility. The Women Life Freedom uprising was visible to anyone with a mobile phone and an uninterrupted internet connection, for as long as the connection lasted before the state severed it. The 2025 protests were visible in flashes before the blackout descended and the killing proceeded in the darkness that the Islamic Republic had constructed specifically to enable it. Visibility is not the problem. The problem is interpretability — whether a given framework possesses categories adequate to what it is seeing, categories in which the struggle can appear as what it actually is rather than as something more convenient, more manageable, more compatible with conclusions already reached before the first shot was fired. The campist framework, lacking the Poulantzian distinction between geopolitical alignment and class character, cannot read a genuine popular insurrection against a state it has positioned on the correct side of its map — it can only recode it as provocation, as manipulation, as the long arm of the American intelligence and military apparatus reaching into the streets of Tehran. The liberal rights framework, lacking the Poulantzian account of the state as a condensation of class forces, can read the dissident insurrection as a human rights event but cannot read it as a class event — cannot see the Iranian working woman removing her headscarf as anything more than a victim asserting her dignity, when she is simultaneously, and more importantly, a political agent challenging a specific configuration of class power whose stake in her subordination is material, structural, and fully analysable.
Against both these forms of illegibility — the campist erasure that cannot see the insurrection at all, and the liberal spectacularisation that can see only its surface — I want to propose what might be called immanent or innate solidarity: solidarity whose grounds are found within the actual, specific, historically constituted relations and struggles of a given conjuncture, grounded at every point in the Poulantzian question of which class forces are condensed in which state apparatuses and what transformation of their balance the struggle in question is capable of producing. Immanent solidarity takes seriously the specific class character of the state being resisted — the Revolutionary Guards as accumulation regime, the Bonyad networks as disciplinary apparatus, the morality police as the enforcement arm of a specific configuration of patriarchal and class power — not as background color but as the central analytical question, the thing that determines both what kind of transformation the struggle might produce and what kind of solidarity would actually serve it rather than merely expressing the solidarity’s authors’ moral preferences. It takes seriously the specific forms of harm the repression produces as symptoms of specific class interests and specific accumulation requirements. And it takes seriously the specific conjunctural position of the struggle — its transformative potential at this moment, in this configuration of forces — without subordinating that assessment to a predetermined hierarchy of contradictions that relieves the analyst of the obligation to actually think.
The question of prioritisation cannot be wished away, and a theory that pretends otherwise is practicing a dishonesty of its own. Political actors operate under constraints of attention, organisational capacity, and resources that make the claim of equal solidarity with all struggles at all times a rhetorical gesture rather than a political commitment. Some form of political judgment about where to direct solidarity, and when, and how, is inescapable — and the question is not whether to make such judgments but on what analytical basis. The campist answer — subordinate solidarity to geopolitical alignment, treat the state’s posture toward Washington as the measure of its progressive character — has been demonstrated by the nearly five decades of Iranian history to produce a politics useless to the people it claims to represent and actively harmful to the movements it purports to support, precisely because it commits the confusion that Poulantzas spent his career systematically dismantling. The liberal answer — measure the severity of rights violations against a universal standard abstracted from structural position — produces a politics of perpetual emergency, capable of moral clarity about individual cases while remaining, by design, incapable of the structural analysis that would allow it to ask whether its interventions strengthen or weaken the class forces capable of transformation. The answer that the Poulantzian framework makes available is conjunctural: the assessment, at each specific historical moment, of which configuration of class forces creates the conditions for a genuine rupture in existing relations of domination, and what solidarity practice would most effectively support and extend the capacity of the subordinate forces to press that rupture toward transformation. This is not a formula. It is a demand for the actual exercise of political thought — thought that takes its categories from the analysis of the conjuncture rather than from the prior commitments of the analyst.
There is a further demand embedded in this conjunctural method that the campist tradition has been particularly, one might say constitutionally, resistant to acknowledging: the demand for revision. A conjunctural assessment describes a configuration of class forces at a specific historical moment, and it is obligated to update when that configuration changes — or when the evidence reveals that it was never what the assessment claimed. The Iranian working class and feminist movement have, across the Green Movement of 2009, the uprisings of 2017 and 2019, the Women Life Freedom movement of 2022, and the nationwide protests of 2026 suppressed under a communications blackout while thousands were killed, demonstrated with whatever clarity history is capable of demonstrating anything that their struggle represents precisely the kind of conjunctural event that the Poulantzian analysis demands be taken seriously — not because it is sympathetic, not because its participants are admirable, though they are, with an extraordinariness that shames the comfort of their Western commentators, but because it represents a working-class and feminist challenge to a specific condensation of class forces whose transformation would have consequences for the balance of power across the region and beyond. The campist Left has failed this analysis not because the evidence was unavailable but because making it would have required revising conclusions that function not as political assessments but as dogma — and dogma, by its very definition, is the place where thinking stops and repetition begins.
The Iranian working class and feminist movement have provided, across forty-seven years of extraordinary courage sustained against extraordinary and meticulously documented violence, a remarkably precise answer to the question of what they actually require from their putative allies on the Western Left. They do not require to be instrumentalised — absorbed into someone else’s geopolitical narrative as evidence of imperial aggression or, in the liberal mode, aestheticised as evidence of universal human dignity violated and then filed away. They do not require the solidarity of people who discover them only when they become useful to a predetermined argument and misplace them when the argument moves on. They do not require to be told, by people whose understanding of the Islamic Republic derives from position papers rather than from living under it, what their struggle is really about, which foreign intelligence service is really directing it, and what theoretical conclusions they ought to draw from their own experience. What they require — what the Poulantzian analysis makes clear they are fully entitled to require — is to be seen as what they actually are: political agents engaged in a struggle against a specific condensation of class forces, with their own analysis of that condensation refined across decades of inhabiting it, their own demands about its transformation, and their own claim, requiring no external authorisation from any Western theoretical tradition, on the solidarity of anyone who takes seriously the proposition that the liberation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. A Left that cannot offer this recognition has not made a theoretical error, though the theoretical errors are real, are serious, and have been described above in some detail. It has made a political choice — to organise its solidarity around its own ideological convenience rather than around the interests of the people whose liberation it spends a remarkable amount of time discussing in their absence. And the people in the prisons, the people in the streets, the people who conducted their struggle under communications blackouts while the Western Left was debating the finer points of anti-imperialist doctrine in conditions of complete personal safety — they are living, and dying, with the consequences of that choice, and have been for longer than most of those making it have been paying attention.
(2) 17 March 2026
In the 1980s the Islamic Republic of Iran — which had come to power branding Israel “the Little Satan,” the imperialist outpost of American domination, the Zionist entity that Khomeini declared must be erased from the map — was purchasing, through back channels and shell companies, American-made fighter jet components, tank parts, advanced missile systems, artillery ammunition, and helicopter spare parts. The seller was Israel. The transaction was, in the strictest theological and ideological sense of the Iranian revolutionary government, an act of collaboration with the enemy of God and mankind. And Khomeini, when informed by one of his generals that the arms they desperately needed were Israeli in origin, paused for exactly two seconds and said, in effect: if you don’t have to ask who sold it, don’t ask.
That anecdote, recounted by Trita Parsi, who interviewed Khomeini’s close adviser directly remains the most rigorous accounting of this clandestine triangle. The anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist identity of the regime was not an incidental rhetorical flourish. It was the regime’s founding legitimating claim, the substance of its mandate. And Khomeini dissolved it in two seconds.
The Israeli side is no less extraordinary. Israel’s strategic doctrine — the so-called “periphery doctrine” — held that the Jewish state’s security depended on cultivating alliances with non-Arab states at the margins of the Arab world: Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia. This made a certain cold-blooded geopolitical sense during the Shah’s era, when Tehran and Jerusalem shared intelligence services, oil pipelines, and a common dread of pan-Arab nationalism. But by 1980, the Iranian partner in that peripheral alliance had just declared Israel a satanic abomination, had severed diplomatic relations, and was conducting, at full volume, a political theology in which the liberation of Jerusalem was a sacred obligation. Israel’s response to this was to sell that same regime tens of millions of dollars in arms in 1981 alone, rising to an estimated half a billion dollars annually by the mid-1980s, financed in substantial part by Iranian oil. Ariel Sharon — the then Defense Minister of the Jewish state — went on American network television in 1982 and openly admitted it, justifying it on the grounds that Israel wanted to bring Iran back into the Western sphere of influence. He said this while the Iranian government was funding movements committed to Israel’s destruction and while Israeli citizens were being told that Khomeinism represented an existential civilizational threat.
What this reveals, beneath the surface absurdity, is something clarifying about how states actually operate versus how they narrate their operation. The performance of ideology — the “Death to Israel” chants, the Little Satan rhetoric, the Israeli security cabinet language about the Iranian menace — is not simply lying, though it contains lies in generous measure. It is the production of a political reality that serves domestic legitimation needs, coalition maintenance, and regional positioning, and it operates on a track that runs parallel to, rather than intersecting with, the track on which actual material transactions occur. The ideology is for the population. The arms deals are for the state. The genius of the arrangement — if genius is the right word for something so morally squalid — is that the population and the state can both be correct, simultaneously, about entirely contradictory things, and neither track need acknowledge the other’s existence.
When the Israeli arms sales began leaking into the Iranian press, at least one person who had disclosed the information was killed. The theocratic state did not merely suppress the information — it liquidated the act of disclosure. This is not the behavior of a government embarrassed by a compromise. It is the behavior of a government that understands, with perfect clarity, that its legitimating ideology cannot survive contact with its own operational reality, and that the distance between the two must be maintained by whatever means necessary, up to and including the elimination of the witnesses.
On the Israeli side, the suppression took a different and perhaps more institutionally revealing form. The covert operation managing the transactions had to be relocated when it became apparent that even the Reagan administration’s comfortable tolerance for Israeli embargo violations had limits. A network of private arms dealers, shell companies, South American cargo airlines, and Mediterranean transit points was constructed not primarily to evade Iranian scrutiny — Iran was the willing buyer — but to maintain deniability within the Western alliance system and to manage the optics of a self-declared Jewish state arming the government that had just called for its destruction. As Parsi noted, the Israelis were acutely aware that their strategic utility to Tehran rested on their unique access to American weapons. They were selling weapons in violation of American sanctions to a regime that America considered a terrorist state, while simultaneously presenting themselves to Washington as its most reliable regional partner. The audacity of this arrangement was profound.
And then there is the true irony, which resists easy moral resolution: Israel’s arms sales to Iran were partly motivated by the desire to protect the tens of thousands of Jews still living inside the Islamic Republic. The same government calling for Israel’s eradication was, in effect, holding Iranian Jews as a tacit bargaining chip, and Israel was purchasing their relative safety with weapons that the regime then used to prosecute a war in Iraq which half a million people died. The humanitarian rationale, the strategic rationale, and the commercial rationale collapsed into a single transaction.
What this says about the relationship between declared enmity and operational reality in Middle Eastern geopolitics — and, by extension, in geopolitics generally — is worth stating with some precision. Declared enmity is a resource. It can be produced, maintained, and deployed in ways that are entirely compatible with material cooperation, provided both parties share an interest in keeping the two tracks separate. Iran needed the weapons more than it needed the theology of anti-Zionism to be operationally consistent. Israel needed the strategic buffer against Saddam and access to oil more than it needed the public performance of confronting Khomeinism. Both states were willing to sustain their respective ideological performances for their respective domestic audiences while conducting, in parallel, the business that the ideology declared impossible. The mullahs chanted death to Israel while their air force flew on Israeli-supplied parts. The Knesset debated the Iranian threat while the Defense Ministry sent monthly weapons lists to Tehran. Both performances were sincere yet fraudulent. This combination is not a paradox — it is the normal operating condition of states that require their populations to believe things that would make governance impossible if true.
The tragedy is that this relationship, which Parsi has described as a “missed opportunity,” was in fact not missed so much as structurally precluded from the beginning. The very mechanism that made the arms trade possible — the parallel tracks, the ideological suppression, the execution of the person who broke the silence — made genuine diplomatic normalization impossible. You cannot build a sustainable relationship on a foundation that requires both parties to publicly deny the relationship exists. The arms trade was real. The enmity was also real, or became real, because it had been so loudly and consistently performed that it eventually constituted the actual political reality it had begun as cover for.
By 1992, when Saddam had been defeated in Kuwait and the Soviet Union had dissolved, the geopolitical conditions that had pushed Israel and Iran into their clandestine embrace evaporated entirely, and what remained was the ideology that both sides had been performing for a decade. Israel pivoted toward Arab normalization and the Oslo process. Iran pivoted deeper into Islamist regional projection — Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the so-called axis of resistance. The arms trade left no institutional memory that could be drawn on, because both sides had been so diligent in ensuring it left no institutional memory. The cover-up was so successful that it covered up the possibility of anything else.
Which brings us, with a grim and rather clarifying logic, to the present moment — to the sustained Israeli military campaign now underway against Iran, to the strikes on Iranian territory, to the killing of senior Revolutionary Guard commanders and, today, the assassination of Ali Larijani, to the systematic degradation of Iranian air defense infrastructure, to what amounts, in effect, to an open war between the two states that once cooperated on a clandestine arms relationship.
The historical irony here carries a diagnostic weight. The Israeli weapons sold to Iran in the 1980s helped the Islamic Republic survive its most existential military crisis — the Iraqi invasion that might, had it succeeded, have strangled the theocracy in its infancy. In a very concrete sense, Israel helped build the regional power it is now attempting to dismantle. The Hawk missiles, the F-4 components, the artillery shells that kept the Iranian military operational during the grinding war of attrition against Saddam — these contributed to the survival of a state that would spend the subsequent four decades constructing the very threat matrix that Israel now cites as justification for preemptive war. There is a word for this, and it is not irony. It is blowback, and it arrives, as it always does, with accrued interest.
But the deeper point — the one that the current war forces into view with particular sharpness — is what the arms relationship of the 1980s reveals about the nature of the conflict now. If two states can conduct a half-billion-dollar annual arms trade while simultaneously maintaining a public theology of mutual annihilation, then the ideology on both sides was never, in any straightforward sense, the cause of the conflict. It was the instrument. The actual drivers — oil, strategic depth, nuclear ambition, the architecture of regional hegemony, the question of which state would emerge as the dominant power between the Levant and Central Asia — these were always material, always reducible to the logic of competing state interests dressed in whatever theological or civilizational costume the moment required.
This matters now because the current Israeli campaign is being framed, on all sides, in the language of existential necessity — of a civilizational struggle between democratic Israel and theocratic Iran, between modernity and medievalism, between the open society and the closed fist of religious absolutism. The civilizational framing is, to put it with appropriate bluntness, selective — and the selectivity is not accidental.
What the 1980s relationship ultimately demonstrates is that the conflict between Israel and Iran has never been, at its core, about what either government says it is about. It is about power — specifically, about which state controls the strategic architecture of the Middle East, about nuclear capability and deterrence posture, about the survival of the Iranian theocracy as a functioning regional projector of force, and about Israel’s determination to prevent the emergence of any regional peer competitor capable of threatening its military supremacy. These are the only concerns that have been operationally consistent across the entire history of the relationship, from the Shah’s oil pipelines to Khomeini’s missile purchases to the current campaign of open war.
The people who will pay the price for the resolution of these concerns, as they always do, are not the strategic planners in Jerusalem or the Revolutionary Guard commanders in their hardened facilities. They are the Iranian civilians living under a regime they cannot remove, who are now absorbing the material consequences of a war between states that spent a decade negotiating weapon sales while calling each other Satan.
And yet, if there is any salvageable principle to be extracted from this decades-long carnival of cynicism, it is precisely the one that neither government has ever been willing to entertain — that the populations conscripted into this performance have interests that are not only distinct from those of their respective states, but actively opposed to them. The Iranian worker who has watched the Revolutionary Guard consume the national wealth in the service of a regional empire he never voted for, the Iranian woman who has spent forty years negotiating the distance between her own body and the theocracy’s claim upon it, the Israeli citizen who has been told, with remarkable consistency, that permanent war is the price of permanent security and who is only now beginning to ask who exactly is collecting that price and where it goes — these people are not, in any meaningful sense, each other’s enemies.
They are the shared victims of governing classes whose power depends, structurally and absolutely, on the maintenance of a mutual enmity that the arms trade of the 1980s demonstrated was never more than a management tool. The liberation that is actually worth the name — not the liberation delivered by F-35s and targeted assassinations, not the liberation promised by a theocracy to a region it intends to dominate — is the liberation that begins when people on both sides of a manufactured frontier recognize that the madmen running their respective countries have been, for decades, running the same con on all of them simultaneously. That recognition has no air force. It has no Revolutionary Guard. What it has, and what no amount of ordnance has yet succeeded in destroying, is the stubborn, unglamorous, and entirely serious insistence of ordinary people that their lives belong to them and not to those who treat war as a game.