VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
On March 17, a senior official in the Trump intelligence community resigned in protest against the war with Iran.
Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the US agency responsible for coordinating and analysing terrorism intelligence, said “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
US imperialism had its own reasons for wanting to attack the Iranian regime, concerned about its siding with the Russian and Chinese imperialists and opposing both US imperialism and Israel.
However, the reasons given by Trump for joining Israel’s surprise attack on Iran, namely, that Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity posed a direct threat to the US, has been undermined by yesterday’s Senate hearing testimony from Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence.
In a written version of her opening statement, Gabbard said Iran's nuclear enrichment program had been "obliterated" in 2025 strikes, and that the regime had not resumed enrichment activities. She omitted that portion of her statement in her spoken testimony, explaining later in the hearing that she did so to save time.
If, as Kent suggests, it was Israel that controlled the timetable for the attack on Iran, then an examination of Israel’s game plan is in order.
Israel is a racist, genocidal, apartheid state with regional expansionist ambitions.
It was created by acts of terrorism and maintains itself through terrorism.
Its existence is based on the 1897 teachings of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl.
Herzl defined Israel based on a promise made by God to Abraham’s descendants that they would inherit the land between the Nile and the Euphrates (Genesis 15:18-21).
The Irgun, the Stern Gang and Haganah terrorised the British into surrendering their Mandate over Palestine, and terrorised Palestinians into fleeing the area that became the State of Israel.
But the Zionists wanted more.
The Irgun flag depicted a map, divided by a gun, with modern Israel on one side, and Jordan on the other. Both were areas sought by the Zionists.
Both were part of Herzl’s Greater Israel which includes parts of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, Turkey and Iraq.
The dream of a Greater Israel is what drives Zionist regional expansionism.
Its chief proponents are Netanyahu, Finance Minister Smotrich (banned from travelling to Australia by the federal government in June 2025), and Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir. Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir live illegally (under international law) on lands seized from Palestinians in the West Bank. Smotrich gave a speech in 2023 at a podium that displayed a map that showed Jordan as part of Israel.
During a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2023, Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map that shows Israel stretching “from the river to the sea.” When his Likud party was formed in 1977, its original party platform read “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (Judea and Samaria refer to the West Bank; Gaza is included in the area between the Sea and the Jordan.)
We are yet to see whether the Queensland government, which has arrested two young people for supporting the Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea”, will also condemn Netanyahu and Australian Zionists for espousing the Zionist’s “from the sea to the river” objective.
Proponents of a Greater Israel have support from an influential section of Trump’s MAGA rightists. Mike Huckabee, who twice ran for the Presidency as a Republican candidate, was appointed Ambassador to Israel in 2025. He is a Christian Zionist and said in an interview aired mid-February that he would not disavow the belief that the Bible promised that land to Israel – even though it now encompasses all or part of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said.
Zionism constitutes an on-going threat to the sovereignty of its neighbours. It provoked the war against Iran in pursuit of Greater Israel, knowing that Iran was supporting elements of the resistance movement in Palestine and in Lebanon and therefore constituted a blockage and obstacle to its further expansion.
US imperialism’s Trump agreed with and participated in the attack. We can thank him every time we fill up our cars for petrol prices that have gone through the roof.
Together, the political ideology of Zionism and the arrogance of the Trump administration must be fought.
Our struggles to halt the incorporation of Australia into the US empire are part of that fight.