Benjamin Netanyahu, in a direct address to the people of Iran, speaks of “peace and prosperity.” A peace for “two ancient peoples”: “Iranians and Jews”. Just one week before the anniversary of a war in which Israel, under Netanyahu’s government, has killed thousands of Palestinians, displaced millions, and escalated the genocide of the people of Palestine and just two days after extending the war to Lebanon to eliminate the “agents of the Islamic Republic,” displacing one-fifth of Lebanon’s population, he speaks of peace to the “noble Persian people.” A peace that, it seems, the Arab people of Palestine and Lebanon have not been deemed worthy of. Our understanding of Netanyahu’s fascist rhetoric is just as “direct”: The Arab people of Palestine, it seems, have not been “noble” enough to deserve “peace”, equality, “infrastructure” for “water and sewage”, and “healthcare” throughout all these years of occupation and colonization, and perhaps it is better if they are entirely annihilated so that the “ancient Jewish people” could live in peace.
Netanyahu’s true intentions are evident beneath the surface of his words that promise imminent peace and prosperity to the people of Iran! Through the illusion of peace, he is, in fact, drawing the lines of war: “There is no place in the Middle East that Israel cannot reach.” There is no place they won’t go to protect their people and their apartheid system, and of course, peace is meant to arrive swiftly—with missiles. Netanyahu has certainly forgotten which “people of Iran” he is addressing. Aren’t these the same people who, over the past seven years, have shown in at least three major uprisings and numerous local and nationwide protests that they possess their own agency and are determined to shape their destiny? Are they not the same people whose chant of “Woman, Life, Freedom” have resonated across the world? Has living under the necropolitical policies of the Islamic Republic not sharpened the senses of many of us to the scent of “life”? Do we need figures like Netanyahu, who has denied “life” to the Palestinians and has been nothing but a herald of war, oppression, and exploitation for his neighboring Arab peoples, to remind us of the “endless poverty, repression, and war” that the Islamic Republic has brought upon us both within and beyond its borders?
In the name of ‘Women, Life, Freedom,’ we reject this blatant hypocrisy and the peace rhetoric that is claimed by the voice of warmongering and fascism. We, in Tanide Collective, in the name of woman and life, stand against the masculine voices of war in the region. We do not forget that freedom grows from our hands that pursue life.