From Tempest
Somayeh Rostampour argues that opponents of U.S.and Israeli aggression in Iran must move beyond campism—or we will not succeed in rebuilding a genuinely emancipatory left or in revitalizing a truly popular internationalism.
Iran is passing through a phase of exceptional violence and intensity. In the wake of the genocide in Palestine and the large-scale destruction inflicted on Lebanon, the United States and Israel are also participating in the devastation of lives, bodies, territories, and vital infrastructures in Iran.There they have been targeting not only refineries and fuel depots, but also health facilities, water resources, energy systems, oil installations, schools, and other civilian spaces. In Minab, a girls’ school was obliterated and more than 168 were killed, among them Baloch children. This war has disrupted the very conditions of social reproduction, further deepened the vulnerability of the working classes. It has undermined the material basis of social autonomy, pushing struggles from below several steps backward, and reinforcing forms of state or social-driven ethno-nationalism. The rapid shift, within the space of a month, from Trump’s promise to “make Iran great again” to the threat of reducing the country to the “stone age” dispelled any remaining ambiguity about the imperial logic at work—a formula that unmistakably recalls the language of the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
This imperialist “external” violence, however, cannot be understood apart from the internal crisis through which the Islamic Republic has been attempting to reconstitute its authority. Since the 2022 uprising, following the police murder of the young Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini, the Islamic Republic has continuously sought, in every war and geopolitical crisis, ways to restore some of the authority and respectability it has lost.
The paradox of imperialist assault and regime legitimacy
The war waged by the genocidal Israeli colonial power against the Palestinians after October 7, 2023, followed by the first Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran in June 2025, offered the Islamic Republic an initial framework for rehabilitation. However, the January 2026 massacre, during which thousands of Iranian demonstrators were killed in just two days by the forces of the theocratic state, simply for protesting against the economic crisis and political dictatorship, reopened an acute crisis of legitimacy, domestically and internationally, for Tehran.
When Iranians were still in mourning, and while many families had not even been able to recover the bodies of their loved ones killed in January, the United States and Israel launched a new imperialist invasion on February 28, 2026, one even more violent than previous assaults. Paradoxically, the attacks have so far helped the Islamic Republic regain some of the credibility it had lost through the bloody repression of the previous month.
These two events, massacre and war, do not constitute either separate sequences or two opposing forms of violence—one repressive and the other supposedly liberatory—but rather successive, even asymmetric, moments of an interconnected counter-revolutionary process. The “external” war prolongs and deepens the internal counter-revolution, enabling the Iranian state to tighten internal cohesion and, once again, stifle popular dissent.
Recognizing this in no way minimizes the fact that Iran has been, and remains, the target of imperialist and colonial aggression carried out with impunity. On the contrary, it requires us to read this assault in terms of its deeper political function: first, as a murderous enterprise of destruction targeting civilian lives, bodies, infrastructure, and territories, carried out under false pretexts and extending the genocidal enterprise pursued in Gaza, as well as in the West bank and Lebanon; and, second, as the provision of new resources to the Islamic Republic for its own reconstitution.
What is campism?
Israeli-U.S. aggression is reinforcing Iran’s militarization, repression, and the crushing of uprisings from below. It is also intensifying a deadly political polarization. On one side, part of the opposition, especially monarchists, welcomed the imperialist bombings in the name of their hostility to the theocratic state. On the other side, other political forces have fallen back into the orbit of the Islamic Republic in the name of anti-imperialism and opposition to war. While the reactionary nature of the first current—pro-Israel, pro-U.S., and pro-genocide—has been readily opposed based on a relative consensus among the progressive and leftist forces, the second current has unfortunately captured parts of the Left and is every bit as significant.
It is within this impasse that the question of campism re-emerges with particular urgency. By campism I mean a range of positions and tendencies that support any force or state based on its opposition to Western imperialism regardless of its reactionary or progressive nature.
Somayeh Rostampour is a Kurdish feminist activist from Iran who participates in an internationalist network and a feminist, anti-imperialist, leftist collective in Paris, founded in 2022 by exiled activists from Iran, Afghanistan, and Kurdistan after the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising. The collective supports subaltern struggles in Iran.
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