Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 20.05,2024
We don’t have any tears for Raisi’s death. However, the question is was Israel or the US behind the accident? Which is too early to know. An Israeli official told Reuters that “Israel was not involved in the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in which several members of his entourage were also killed.”[i]
The eighth president of Iran was killed at the age of 63 while returning from a visit to Azerbaijan. He held several positions in Iran’s judicial system, including the Attorney General and President of the Supreme Court. In these positions, he was responsible for the execution of thousands of people who opposed the regime.
In 1978-9 the working class of Iran and the masses could make a revolution. However, the Stalinist reformist party, the Tudeh Party of Iran, had a considerable connection to the working class, and the Petit bourgeois Fedayeen guerrillas played into the hands of the Ayatollahs when Khomeini arrived from his exile in France. The Tudeh held the old Mensheviks counter-revolutionary theory of two stages of revolution and supported the Ayatollahs because they led the democratic revolution. Similarly, the Egyptian Stalinist party supported Al Sisi’s coup because Al Sisi was completing the democratic revolution. These betrayals should not surprise us as in Syria, the Stalinists supported Asad the butcher alongside Iran, and in Israel, in the war of 1948, the Stalinists brought weapons to the Zionists who used them for the Nakba. The Tude and the Fedayeen had been weakened considerably by government repression including the role of Raisi and so was the Egyptian Stalinist party by Al Sisi.
Suppose Israel would have been behind the crash of the helicopter – in that case, it may lead to a regional war, as Netanyahu hopes, and in such a war, the interest of the working class will be for the defeat of Israel without giving the Iranian regime any political support.
For a socialist revolution in Iran, as part of the socialist federation of the Middle East!
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.israelhayom.co.il/news/world-news/middle-east/article/15776346