By Sue Harris
April 24, 2026
There are two ways of conducting a war that have become fairly obvious in this current phase of the battle between imperialism and the resistance against it.
The style of the resistance is to limit the destructive power of imperialism, to destroy their military bases and to destroy their weapons and the factories that produce them — to make it unprofitable to attack, as by blocking the Strait of Hormuz as Iran has done.
This approach is an attack against objects and not people. The message is “go away and leave us alone, or you’ll be sorry.” That is pretty much how Iran and the rest of the resistance in West Asia are fighting imperialism.
“Violence that is directed largely at military targets is permissible in certain conditions under international law; violence that is indiscriminate, such as when massive bombs are used against civilians, violates the laws of war.” (Carlos Cardenas, Telesur, April 16, 2026)
Iran’s missiles have exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence facilities and not civilian areas. Hezbollah, meanwhile, targeted Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in September 2024. Neither Iran nor Hezbollah have fired their munitions into congested neighborhoods of Israeli cities. (Telesur, April 16)
The imperialist fighting style, practiced by the U.S. and Israel, is characterized by massive destruction of civilian targets, designed to kill as many people as possible, to even erase them and their culture entirely and to make room for the invading imperialists and their settler-colonial culture.
The Israelis call this “mowing the lawn.” They want to make it appear that the civilization they invade never existed.
It’s akin to the real estate developers’ drive to ‘ethnically cleanse’ the population of a neighborhood the developer wants in order to get bigger profits from richer tenants. To do this requires the developer to think of the population they’re invading as less than human, more like ants.
‘Normalization’
It’s not important what happens to them.
Same for the imperialist. The native population they want to cleanse must be destroyed. They’re labeled “terrorists, savages” and beneath their notice. In West Asia, Israel calls this way of thinking “normalization.”
The definition of normalization is described by author and human rights activist Dr. Randa Abdel Fattah: “Try to exist as if, a million times a day, we’re not confronted with the fact that we live in a world that has normalized the live-streamed annihilation of Arab and Muslim lives.” (Mondoweiss, April 10)
Normalization must exist for the imperialist for killing and brutality towards people to be considered acceptable. If it’s not normalized, it will be harder for the soldier to kill, for the prison guard to rape.
In the U.S., there is strong opposition to the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, as well as against the war against Iran. People are beginning to wake up to this pattern of imperialism. They see that it happened with Indigenous peoples in the Western hemisphere, that it happened in Mexico, Vietnam, in lots of places.
They see that it happens every day in the U.S. between the rich and the poor: murder and theft for profit, with normalization of racism, homophobia and demonization of oppressed groupings in the population. So that it doesn’t matter if the cops or ICE get off for killing an unarmed person. And it doesn’t matter if patients die for lack of medication or medical care. Under capitalism, poor people are not important. Only profit is.
But people are waking up more and more to the truth. They’re beginning to get the message that what goes on in places like China or Cuba is everybody getting their needs met and nobody having to die or go hungry because they’re poor.
There is a lot of falsification and demonizing going on that prevents people in imperial countries from seeing that more hopeful message, but with the advances in technology and communication, the truth keeps getting out. And the more people wake up, the less imperialist oppression will feel normal.
