The Campist Bargain: Palestine as Alibi for Every Other Crime

Jina Mahsa Amini Was Not a Western Stooge

Up to 100,000 people, by police estimates, marched in Munich against the Islamic Republic. The response from sections of the online left was immediate, predictable, and politically catastrophic.

One critic, writing from a serious Marxist position, made an observation worth engaging: the German state permits enormous demonstrations against Iran while brutalising pro-Palestine protesters. The differential policing is real. It is structural. Berlin has kettled, beaten, and banned Palestine solidarity marches while this procession moved unmolested through the Theresienwiese. Anyone who has stood on a Palestine demonstration in a German city and watched the riot police form lines knows this hypocrisy in their bones. It deserves relentless exposure.

But the conclusion drawn from this fact was a disaster. The logic ran as follows: if Western governments tolerate a protest, the protest must serve Western interests; therefore the protesters are dupes, chauvinists, or worse. The marchers were performing solidarity that “conveniently allows Western chauvinists to feel like the pinnacle of humanity, compared to vaguely imagined barbarism beyond the frontier of civilisation.” The so-called democratic freedoms, we were told, work perfectly well in Germany: all you have to do is align yourself fully with the state.

This is campism in its polite form. It identifies a real contradiction, then resolves it in the wrong direction. The German state’s selective tolerance of different protests tells us something important about which struggles bourgeois democracy considers safe and which it considers threatening. But the answer to that interrogation cannot be: therefore the Iranian masses have no legitimate grievance. That is not solidarity with Palestine. It is the instrumentalisation of Palestine to delegitimise every other struggle for liberation that happens to embarrass a regime the Western left has decided, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Iranian working class, not to criticise too loudly.

Where the logic terminates

Follow this reasoning past the polite version and you arrive somewhere uglier. A second commenter demonstrated the destination with admirable clarity. The Iranian diaspora, we were informed, consists of “lunatic monarchists and the worst sort of gusanos the west has to offer.” The Woman, Life, Freedom uprising was dismissed as “Kurdish separatism.” And the kicker: “you can’t claim to be pro-Palestine if you want to take out a government that’s been consistent in supporting Palestinian resistance groups militarily, financially, and politically.”

There it is. Stated plainly, without the academic hedging: Iranian workers, women, and national minorities should forfeit their right to international solidarity because the regime that murders them also funds Hamas. That is the position. Strip away the rhetoric and it stands naked.

The “monarchist gusanos” characterisation first. Yes, monarchists exist in the Iranian diaspora. Reza Pahlavi has a following. The MEK are charlatans. Nobody on the serious left disputes this. But to reduce every Iranian who opposes the theocracy to a monarchist stooge is not analysis. It is erasure: the deliberate flattening of an entire society’s internal class struggle to protect a geopolitical narrative. The diaspora also contains socialists, trade unionists, feminists, Kurdish activists, Baluch organisers, and survivors of Evin prison. To pretend otherwise requires a motivated ignorance that borders on contempt.

The “Kurdish separatism” sneer is particularly revealing. The 2022 uprising carried the name of a Kurdish woman: Jina Mahsa Amini, murdered by the “morality police” in Tehran. The movement was strongest in Kurdistan. The Islamic Republic’s response? The IRGC deployed against Kurdish cities with live ammunition, killing hundreds. To dismiss this as “separatism” is to adopt, word for word, the language of the Iranian state itself. Every colonial and semi-colonial regime in history has described national liberation movements this way. The British said it about Ireland. The French said it about Algeria. The Turkish state says it about Kurdistan today. And now sections of the Western left parrot the same line, because the wrong empire is doing the oppressing.

The “Axis of Resistance” myth

The claim that Iran “consistently supports Palestinian resistance” deserves the scrutiny its advocates never apply to it. The Islamic Republic’s relationship to Palestine is not solidarity. It is instrumentalisation.

Even the SWP’s own Pre-Conference Bulletin acknowledges the dynamic plainly enough. Iran, “ribboned by an internal crisis” after suppressing the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, “wants to rebuild its relationship with Saudi Arabia, and is banking on reopening negotiations with the West to end sanctions.” The Palestinian and Lebanese resistance, the SWP’s own document states, functions for Iran as “a bargaining chip,” precisely as Arab regimes abandoned the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s.

This is not a sectarian gloss on events. It is the SWP’s analysis, published in their own internal documents. The “Axis of Resistance” is a branding exercise for a theocratic state pursuing its own regional interests. When those interests required it, Iran stood by while Israel devastated Lebanon. When Assad needed saving, Hezbollah crossed into Syria to crush a revolution. The “consistency” of Iran’s support for Palestine extends exactly as far as Iranian state interests require and not one centimetre further.

A regime that hangs trade unionists does not become progressive because it ships weapons to Gaza. The Stalinist bureaucracy armed national liberation movements across three continents. That did not make the gulag a workers’ paradise. The Fourth International learned to make this distinction decades ago; it is depressing to watch sections of the contemporary left unlearn it in real time.

The balance sheet of actually existing resistance

The campist case rests, ultimately, on a claim about material reality. Whatever your theoretical objections to the Axis of Resistance, these are the forces actually fighting. They have rockets. They have supply lines, territory, and the capacity to inflict costs on Israel and its backers. Social movements have placards. In a contest between material force and moral appeal, material force wins. To argue otherwise is to prefer comfortable abstraction to the grim arithmetic of war.

Accept the premise. Take the campists at their word that material effectiveness is the criterion. Then examine the balance sheet.

We have already seen how Iran’s “support” for Palestine functions in practice: as a bargaining chip to be traded when circumstances require. But consider what that resistance has cost the Iranian working class. The crushing of the Haft Tappeh sugar cane workers who dared to demand unpaid wages and factory councils. The imprisonment of bus drivers from the Vahed Syndicate for the crime of organising independently. The systematic destruction of every independent labour organisation, every women’s rights campaign, every student movement that might constitute an alternative centre of power to the clerical regime.

This is not a side-effect of resistance. It is the condition of it. The Islamic Republic’s capacity to project power regionally depends on the suppression of domestic dissent. The rockets that fly towards Israel are manufactured in an economy built on the immiseration of Iranian workers. The campist framework asks us to celebrate the rockets and ignore the immiseration, as though these were separate phenomena rather than two faces of the same regime.

Move to Lebanon. Hezbollah’s military capacity was real. No one disputes this. Its fighters inflicted genuine costs on the Israeli military in 2006, and its rocket arsenal represented a material deterrent that no solidarity demonstration could replicate. The campists are right about that much.

But Hezbollah’s military capacity came at a price, and the price was paid by the Lebanese people. When the October 2019 uprising erupted across Lebanon, when workers and the unemployed took to the streets demanding an end to the sectarian carve-up that had produced economic collapse, corruption on a scale that beggars description, and an explosion in Beirut harbour that killed over 200 people: Hezbollah’s cadres attacked the protesters. Not metaphorically. Physically. They rode into demonstration camps on motorbikes and beat people who had dared to challenge the sectarian system from which Hezbollah draws its domestic power. The party of resistance turned its organisational capacity against the one force that might have built a non-sectarian, working-class alternative in Lebanon. Popular sovereignty was the price of military capacity. Ask the Lebanese left whether that bargain was worth it. They have been asking themselves that question in the wreckage of south Beirut.

Then Syria: the case the campists would most prefer to forget. Bashar al-Assad maintained “resistance” credentials for two decades. He opposed Israel. He hosted Palestinian factions in Damascus. He was aligned with Iran and Russia. And on the strength of those credentials, substantial sections of the Western left either defended his regime or went silent when he turned his military against the Syrian population.

The barrel bombs that fell on working-class neighbourhoods in Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta were dropped by a member state of the Axis of Resistance. The chemical weapons deployed at Khan Sheikhoun and Douma were deployed by a government whose anti-imperialist posture bought it years of apologism from people who should have known better. When Syrian socialists, trade unionists, and democratic activists begged the international left for solidarity, they were told, in effect, that their suffering was a regrettable but secondary consideration. The primary contradiction was American imperialism. Assad opposed American imperialism. Therefore Assad was, if not an ally, then at least not an enemy worth naming.

Palestine was the alibi. It was always the alibi. Assad’s willingness to host Hamas’s political bureau in Damascus functioned as a kind of moral insurance policy, proof of anti-imperialist credentials that could be invoked whenever the question of what his regime was doing to its own population became too uncomfortable to ignore.

And Gaza itself. Whatever one’s assessment of armed resistance in principle, and the right of an occupied people to resist by force is not in question here, the balance sheet of October 7th must be reckoned with honestly. Hamas’s operation did not produce liberation. It produced the acceleration of a genocide that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, displaced virtually the entire population of Gaza, and destroyed the physical infrastructure of Palestinian life in the Strip for a generation. The Israeli state bears full criminal responsibility for that genocide. But the campist claim was never merely moral; it was strategic. “These are the forces that can actually affect military outcomes”, the argument ran. “The Axis of Resistance has the material capacity to change things”.

Has it? Iran’s retaliatory strikes were calibrated to avoid escalation. Hezbollah has been devastated. Assad fell anyway, in the end, though not to the forces anyone predicted. The material capacity of the Axis of Resistance to protect the Palestinian people has proven to be exactly as illusory as its critics warned. The capacity to inflict costs is not the capacity to achieve liberation. Confusing the two is not strategic realism; it is fantasy dressed in military hardware.

Count the corpses. Count the unions broken, the women imprisoned, the popular movements crushed by the very regimes the campists ask us to celebrate as allies. The Axis of Resistance has resisted everything except the immiseration of its own populations.

The real uprising they want you to forget

The 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement was not a CIA colour revolution. It was not “Kurdish separatism.” It was a mass uprising of the Iranian working class and oppressed nationalities against a theocratic capitalist state.

The petrochemical workers struck. The teachers’ unions mobilised. Students occupied universities in Tehran and Sanandaj. Women burned hijabs in the streets while security forces fired live rounds into crowds. The regime killed at least 551 people, according to Iran Human Rights, and arrested more than 22,000. Baluch communities in Zahedan faced particular savagery; the “Bloody Friday” massacre of 30 September 2022 killed at least eighty people leaving a mosque.

These are the people being written off as “Western stooges” and “Persian supremacists.” The woman whose murder sparked the uprising was Kurdish. The communities that resisted most fiercely were national minorities. The workers who struck did so at enormous personal risk, in a country where independent trade unionism is a crime punishable by imprisonment and torture. To dismiss this as a project of Western imperialism requires a contempt for the Iranian masses that no amount of anti-imperialist vocabulary can disguise.

The Iranian comrades from Solidarité avec les Travailleurs en Iran, writing in die internationale, describe the current situation with a clarity that should shame the campist commentators. The ceasefire with Israel, they argue, provides the Islamic Republic “a unique opportunity to intensify repression, mass arrests, and executions.” The pretext of national security enables the regime to target dissidents it previously hesitated to move against openly. The fabricated charge of “espionage or collaboration with a hostile state” legitimises everything from torture to execution. Walking through the streets of Tehran means risking arbitrary searches; the slightest sign of dissent can generate a criminal file and justify arrest.

This is the regime that campists insist we must not criticise because it arms Hamas.

The Palestine test, reversed

The campist commenter insisted: “you can’t claim to be pro-Palestine if you want to take out a government that’s been consistent in supporting Palestinian resistance.” Turn this logic around and examine what it actually demands.

It demands that Palestinian solidarity be conditional on silence about every other crime committed by states that claim the Palestinian cause as diplomatic cover. This is the logic that led sections of the left to defend Assad’s barrel bombs on Syrian civilians. It is the logic that excuses Ortega’s repression of Nicaraguan trade unionists, because Nicaragua opposes US hegemony. It is the logic that produces apologetics for Putin’s colonial war in Ukraine, because Russia challenges the Western order. Each betrayal follows inevitably from the one before, because the framework has no mechanism for distinguishing between a state’s foreign policy posture and its domestic class character.

The Palestinian struggle deserves better allies than those who would reduce it to a loyalty test for authoritarian regimes. Palestinians in Gaza are not fighting so that Iranian trade unionists can be hanged in peace. The liberation of Palestine, as Joseph Daher has argued repeatedly, is inextricably linked to the liberation of the Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Iranian working classes from their own regimes. The “Axis of Resistance” crushes these working classes while instrumentalising Palestine. Supporting the axis is not solidarity with Palestine. It is solidarity with the states that use Palestine.

Toward an honest anti-imperialism

The campists will object: what, then, is the alternative? If not the Axis of Resistance, which at least has guns, then what material force do you propose?

The question deserves a serious answer, not a slogan. And the answer begins with a distinction the campist framework systematically obscures: the difference between inflicting costs and building power.

States and armed movements can inflict costs on imperialism. They cannot build the social transformation that ends imperialism’s material basis. They cannot do this because their own class character prevents it. A theocratic capitalist state like Iran, a confessional militia like Hezbollah, a Bonapartist dictatorship like Assad’s: these formations rest on the exploitation and political subordination of working people. They can fire rockets across borders. They cannot build the independent organisations of the working class and the oppressed that are the only social force capable of dismantling imperialism at its roots. They will not do this, because to do so would threaten their own power. The rockets and the repression come from the same source.

This is not an abstract point. It has concrete, strategic consequences. Every national liberation movement that has subordinated itself to a “friendly” state has been betrayed when that state’s interests shifted. The Palestinians know this better than anyone. Nasser used them. Assad used them. The Saudis used them. Iran uses them now. The pattern is not accidental. It is structural. States pursue state interests. When those interests align with a liberation struggle, they provide support. When those interests diverge, they trade the struggle away. This is what happened at every “peace process” in Palestinian history, and it is what will happen again whenever Iran calculates that rapprochement with the West is worth more than the Palestinian cause.

The alternative is not moral witness. It is not placards. It is the patient, difficult, unglamorous work of building international working-class organisation with the material capacity to act: the dock workers in Genoa and Livorno who refused to load arms shipments bound for Israel; the trade union federations that have imposed real economic costs through targeted boycotts; the logistics workers who have disrupted supply chains; the soldiers and reservists in Israel itself who have begun to refuse service. These are small forces, yes. Uneven and incomplete. But:- they represent something the Axis of Resistance, for all its rockets, does not and cannot: the embryo of a social power rooted in the working class, capable of growth, capable of transformation, directed not by the calculations of a state but by the self-organisation of the people who actually produce the wealth that makes imperialism possible.

The anti-apartheid movement did not liberate South Africa by cheering for the Soviet Union, though the Soviet Union armed the ANC. It was liberated by the combination of armed resistance, mass popular mobilisation, international solidarity from below, and above all the organised power of the black South African working class. The campists of the 1980s who insisted that solidarity meant uncritical alignment with Moscow contributed nothing to that victory. The trade unionists in Durban, the community organisers in Soweto, the dock workers in Liverpool and San Francisco who refused to unload South African goods: they were the material force that mattered.

Building that kind of internationalism is harder than picking a team. It requires identifying and strengthening the independent organisations of the working class and oppressed in every country: the ecosocialist and feminist currents within Palestinian civil society, the independent trade union movement in Iran, the Russian anti-war left, the Kurdish liberation movement, the Syrian democratic opposition in exile. It requires programmatic commitments to self-determination, democracy, and class independence that cut against both imperialist blocs. It requires, above all, the political judgement to distinguish between a state’s foreign policy posture and its actual relationship to the people who live under it.

The German state’s differential treatment of protests is worth fighting. The criminalisation of Palestine solidarity across Europe is an outrage that demands organised resistance. The hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy, which permits marches against Official Enemies while banning solidarity with the oppressed, is a structural feature of imperialism that revolutionaries must expose relentlessly.

None of this requires us to become cheerleaders for the Islamic Republic. None of it requires us to dismiss tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly from the Iranian diaspora, as pawns of Western chauvinism. None of it requires us to spit on the memory of Jina Mahsa Amini by calling the movement her murder sparked a project of “Kurdish separatism.”

An anti-imperialism worthy of the name fights on every front. Against NATO expansion and Western militarism. Against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Against the theocratic butchers in Tehran. Against Russian imperialism in Ukraine. Against every state that crushes its working class, regardless of which geopolitical “camp” it claims to inhabit. And it fights with the only weapon that can actually end imperialism rather than merely rearrange its furniture: the independent, international organisation of the working class and the oppressed.

The alternative is not anti-imperialism at all. It is a protection racket for authoritarian states, operated by Western leftists who will never have to live under the regimes they defend. Ask the women of Tehran’s prisons whether the people who marched for them in Munich were performing civilisational superiority. Ask the families of the November 2019 massacre victims. Ask the petrochemical workers who struck in solidarity with Jina and paid for it with their freedom.

Their answer will not fit neatly into a campist spreadsheet. But it will be the truth.

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Postscript: The Arab Regimes and the Palestinian Bargain

The campist imagination requires a certain innocence about the behaviour of the states it recruits to the “anti-imperialist” cause. A reader asks us to consider Hafez al-Assad. In 1976 he sent tens of thousands of Syrian troops into Lebanon, operating first under the fiction of the Palestine Liberation Army, then openly as the Syrian Army. Their mission: to stop the PLO and the Lebanese National Movement from defeating the Maronite right-wing militias, and to prevent what Damascus calculated would be a destabilising PLO victory.

Syrian forces fought against Palestinian and Lebanese leftist militias. They rescued the Christian right. The PLO, facing defeat, was saved not by Arab solidarity but by Israeli and American calculation that a Syrian stabilisation served everyone’s purposes at that particular moment.

None of this makes Assad an Israeli agent. The politics were more layered than that: Damascus wanted strategic leverage over Lebanon, feared Israeli intervention on unfavourable terms, and sought to keep the PLO as a manageable instrument of Syrian regional policy rather than an independent revolutionary force. Control, not solidarity. Management, not liberation.

This is precisely the campist bargain’s hidden clause. The “Axis of Resistance” has never been an axis of Palestinian liberation; it has been an axis of regional power management in which Palestinian lives are the bargaining chips. Assad’s troops in 1976. Iran’s strategic deployment of the Palestinian question as a sanction card in 2024. The pattern does not require a conspiracy. It requires only that we take seriously what these states actually are.