We Refuse to be “Geopolitical Others”

در هزار جا

من به پایان می‌رسم

می‌سوزم

می‌شوم ستاره‌ای خاموش

که در آسمانت

دود می‌شود.

In a thousand places

I come to an end

I burn

I become a fading star

that turns to smoke

in your sky

Parnia Abbasi, Setare-ye Khamoush (Fading Star)

Parnia Abbasi was a 23-year-old poet in Iran who was killed, along with her entire family, on the first night of the Israeli attack on June 13th, 2025, when a residential building in the Sattarkhan neighbourhood of Tehran was struck.

Her poem “The Fading Star” was published in the poetry magazine Vazn-e Donya in December 2024. In another poem titled “A Knot of Pain,” Parnia writes:

"When you close your eyes to me / You lift the heights of defeat / Through my eyes."

We remember Parnia, and many more dear souls who turned to smoke and stars, with our eyes never closing to them, refusing to let their memories fade away, and never letting defeat walk through our eyes.

***

The U.S-Israeli killing machine has now extended its reach to Iran—and it is with profound grief that we write these words. This latest escalation unfolds alongside the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the broader Israeli campaign of war, starvation, siege, destruction, and displacement, materially and ideologically backed by Israel’s Western allies. We write with deep sorrow and righteous anger—our attention torn between our loved ones and comrades in Iran, now under bombardment and internet blackout, and the relentless annihilation and aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and other places in the region.

It is no surprise to us that Israel, the United States, and its European backers are once again deploying familiar, dehumanizing tropes to legitimize a new phase of aggression—this time against Iran. The discursive playbook is painfully familiar: femonationalist calls to “liberate” Iranian women through bombs, and Western officials calling this assault a “dirty job” done “on behalf of us all (Westerns).”^[1] These are not new narratives. From the War on Terror to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we have seen how racist, imperialist, and capitalist logics, draped in the language of “freedom,” justify dehumanization, mass murder and destruction. Under these politics, our lives are disposable, our homes expendable—sometimes justified in our name, often not.

So, there is no room left for  naïvity with regards to these formations. More importantly, since October 7,  and through months of witnessing the ongoing genocide, as well as various grassroots organizing campaigns for Palestine, some of us have tried to learn what arguments to make, and where to place our focus.. Precisely because of this, we do not waste time merely “condemning” the mainstream media’s logic about Iran. That is a worn-out game, and playing it is not our task.

Instead, we write for political clarity—from and about Iran—to our leftist, feminist, and other comrades beyond the border regimes, especially now, as this war redraws boundaries and shifts demarcations around the Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism, internally and regionally. We write in defense of our grassroots resistance, our uprisings, our comrades in prison, and our collective desires for self-determination. We write in defense of our futures.

In doing so, we think of three urgent tasks: first, to reject the Western left’s long-standing practice of “geopolitical othering,” toward Iran (structurally similar to that of Syria); second, to center the political standpoints of unions, grassroot collectives and other under-recognized voices emerging from Iran today, instead of refrencing the state’s narrative; and third, to affirm the necessity of feminist and leftist coalition-building—preserving the “we’s” we’ve struggled to build, breaking from those that have othered us, and forging new “we’s” with our revolutionary comrades.

The war on Iran threatened the lives of over 90million people, with more than 10million residents of Tehran facing forced displacement under Israeli- and U.S.-backed evacuation orders. Multiple places, including residential buildings and hospitals across the country have been targeted, and the death toll reached hundreds (we refuse to say the numbers). In this moment, as newsfeeds are overflooded with missile counts and geopolitical speculation, our focus, rather than centering on geopolitical concerns, lies elsewhere: What happens to the years of local resistance and dreams of freedom of those who endured Israeli bombardments—and now its aftermath? 

Since the war on Iran began, many long-standing political disagreements have resurfaced—summoning debates around recognizing local feminist and leftist resistance movements in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran; supporting Syrian and Kurdish revolutionary comrades; and rejecting the endorsement of forces that have violently suppressed them, all in the name of geopolitical “necessity” and the supposed “stabilizing” role of authoritarian regimes like that of Bashar al-Assad. 

The consistent dismissal of voices, demands, and resistance movements, especially in Syria and Iran—seen as “secondary concerns” or “inevitable collateral damage”—is the structural approach through which a fantasy of “resistance” is built. And the corpses of Middle Eastern people are the ones made to pay the price for the realization of this fantasy—a mockery of freedom masquerading as “anti-imperialism.” 

Take, for instance, Yanis Varoufakis’s recent Instagram post, where he refers to the attack on Iran as a “distraction” from Gaza—assuming the struggles of the region are separate, unrelated, and divisible. He writes: “Ignore the war with Iran. Iranians can defend themselves.”^[2]

But who is this “Iranian” in Varoufakis’s imagination? Is it the Afghan migrants, stripped of mobility rights and unable even to evacuate Tehran? Is it the political prisoners, some already sentenced to death? Is it the journalists reporting under bombardment and blackout while the world hesitates to look? Is it the laborers, bound to their work with no right to leave, let alone defend their lives? Is it marginalized nations and ethnic minorities, like the Kurdish people, some of whom are already facing unbearable conditions as kulbars and are now accused of carrying missiles, or the people of Balochistan, who already live in a heavily militarized situation?

Who are we—the people of these lands—to this discourse? Are we comrades standing shoulder to shoulder, or merely a geopolitical “other,” expected to be suppressed and, if necessary, killed for an externally imposed vision of resistance?

This politics of geopolitical othering is not new to us. As another example, Jina’s uprising has also been dismissed by some leftist standpoints as “American propaganda” against the “anti-imperial” regime of Iran. When grassroots movements on the ground (and here we are not talking about some diasporic right-wing celebrities who are feeding into Israeli narratives) are labelled “propaganda,” when some aspects of local resistance are deemed ignorable, and when people beneath Israeli bombs reduced to a “distraction” to avoid: this is the moment of othering, in which, to echo the words of Palestinian poet Fady Joudah, “I am removing me from the we of you.”^[3]

Photo by Bijan Azimi (@bjn.art.photo on Instagram)

By this, we come to our second thread of centering voices coming from the ground of war and resistance:

A few days after the start of the war, the Iranian Writers Association (IWA) released a statement addressing the situation while unconditionally condemning the Israeli war and genocidal machine.^[4] Founded in 1968, IWA is an independent collective committed to defending authors’ rights and opposing censorship. Despite decades of state repression and a wave of state-sponsored assassinations targeting its members, it remains a powerful site of collective political resistance for authors and poets in Iran. In their statement, following a reckoning with the gravity of the moment, they write:

All this unfolds before the eyes of a world in which two media poles swallow independent voices from both sides: one that turns a warmongering regime notorious for child-killing into a savior, and another that cloaks the repressive face of the Islamic Republic under the guise of homeland defense.

The IWA’s statement precisely touches on the point that holds no place for many of our leftist comrades in the West regarding the transnational Middle East: the political agency of the people and their histories of resistance in determining their own destiny:

Neither the foreign aggressor nor the domestic oppressor has the right to usurp the agency and will of the people in determining their destiny. It is the right of every nation to resist an invasion of its land, just as it is the right of every nation to refuse submission to a freedom-crushing regime.  

Alongside the IWA’s statement, a number of feminist voices have articulated clear political positions on the matter. For example, Dasgoharan—an anonymous collective of Baloch women related to one of Iran’s most marginalized communities, historically subjected to military oppression, mass executions, massacres, resource extraction, and systematic deprivation of basic needs—published a communiqué on June 17, 2025, opposing Israel’s war on Iran.^[5] They write:

Souls and bodies are hurting, children are terrified, and the sound of air defense and missiles has become the constant background noise of the cities. Under these circumstances, we condemn the attack on Iran under any pretext, and that’s it. This condemnation does not include a single footnote.

This communique further emphasizes the urgent need to build transnational feminist coalitions across the region:

In this situation we do not write a statement. These lines that you are reading are communique. A communique to those who share our destiny and our world from Palestine to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq, Libya and other nations under colonization, exploitation, and occupation.

Dasgoharan’s voice is not the only one rising from the depths of systemic oppression to reject, “without footnote”, Israel’s genocidal presence in the region. In another profoundly important statement—released from within the walls of the Evin prison that Israel bombed a few days after—four women political prisoners (Reyhaneh Ansari, Sakineh Parvaneh, Verisheh Moradi, and Golrokh Iraee) write:^[6]

It [Israel] was born through massacre and crime, became a homeowner through occupation, and throughout its existence, turned the Middle East into a battlefield of endless wars through aggression and genocide. 

Israel emerged as America's military outpost in the Middle East—an agent of the global superpowers that rose after World War II—and from the very beginning, it has displayed its brutality to the world: in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and most recently, through the genocide in Gaza.

It is crucial to note that one of the signatories, Verishe Moradi, a Kurdish woman sentenced to death, writes from a position of imminent danger. Now, amid news of war, political prisoners like her face an even greater risk of being silenced. And yet, they write and sign with unwavering clarity:

Our liberation, the liberation of the people in Iran from the ruling dictatorship, is only possible through mass struggle and by relying on social forces, not by placing our hopes in foreign powers.

Reading through all these statements and words written under the Israeli bombs gives us the power to say: We have already defined our “we.”  We understand that our connection to the Palestinian cause is not merely a political choice—not just another queer/trans anti-imperialist or anti-colonial reading of the region—but a vital and material necessity. Connecting our pain to that of the mothers of the disappeared in Syria, the prisoners in Egypt, and the people searching through Gaza’s rubble for the bodies of their beloveds—and aligning our struggles with what we have learned from our comrades in Rojava, Syria and Palestine —is not merely a theoretical gesture of transnational solidarity. It is, for sure, a refusal of geopolitical rhetoric—but more importantly, a strategy for sustaining our resistance through one another, for holding up each other’s “No’s” to the system.

We think of this “we” while reading Shima Vezvaei, a feminist activist and journalist in Tehran, who wrote these lines in one of the Instagram stories she could barely post due to the Internet blackout:

In these moments, I find myself thinking of the hashtag #من_یحرر_یقرر. “The ones who liberate also decide.”  It once trended in Syria and became part of public discussion. I remember all the irony, narratives, and concerns, some of which I only heard recently. These remarks came from people who believed that, in this kind of decision-making, the agency and history of struggle, built by hundreds of groups, organizations, individuals, martyrs, prisoners, and exiles, were being erased and turned into nothing more than a banner of “change and freedom.” I want to keep repeating that being freed from a chain does not mean liberation. And no one has the right to represent us or make decisions on our behalf. Ever! Also, [no one has the right to speak for] all those who fought before us with their minds, their bodies, and their histories.^[7]

What are we trying to read between these lines? The pieces we have brought together here are examples of collective and individual political positions that insist on a particular intersection: an unconditional opposition and resistance to foreign military aggression and the imposition of global hegemonic order, while remaining rooted in the history and tradition of internal, local struggles against oppressive states. These are only a few examples of voices that are undoubtedly diverse, and their shared insistence on these two points does not make them homogeneous. There are many other statements and commentaries—from trade unions,^[8] other statements from inside prison, as well as positions voiced by feminist groups and activists—that align politically in a similar way. 

Undoubtedly, our selection is biased, and there are certainly political positions that are not reflected in this text. This piece makes no claim to political “neutrality”—nor does it believe in such a thing. Even if the impossibility or hollowness of neutrality can be masked in the silence and “peace” of academia or the glitz of mainstream media networks, it cannot be concealed in writings that emerge alongside genocide, war, and mass-killing. We are biased in defense of our home, our comrades, and our future. But this refusal of neutrality does not mean that the position this text speaks from is narrow or dismissive. On the contrary, it means that bias is the only way to resist the silencing force of mainstream media, and to stand firmly with a position that has risen from a wide multiplicity of voices on the actual ground of war, resistance, and political activism.

A “ceasefire” has now been declared between Iran and Israel. But Israel's “commitment” to the true meaning of a ceasefire, whether in Lebanon or Gaza, fools no one. The ongoing genocide in Gaza stands as undeniable proof of this. In times like this, both the present and the future remain fragile, haunted by uncertainty and fear. And yet, amid this volatility, “we” invoked in this piece remains crucial. This “we” is precisely the one that has long unsettled both global and regional systems of domination. This is a “we” that owns its political imagination, agency, and determination. This “we” exists.