On April 11, a devastating cyberattack forced the shutdown of one of Iran’s biggest nuclear facilities. The Iranian government has called it “an act of terrorism” and blamed Israel for the attack. The attack took place just hours after scientists at the Natanz reactor restarted spinning advanced centrifuges intended to speed up the production of enriched uranium.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a statement to the international media a few hours after the attack, saying that “the struggle against Iran and its proxies and the Iranian armament efforts is a huge mission”. The attack was widely covered by Israeli media, with the official radio arrogantly claiming that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had masterminded it.
Natanz has been the target of Israeli attacks even before this. In July 2020 an explosion suspected to be triggered by Israel damaged a centrifuge assembly plant. A combined CIA and the Mossad cyber-attack in 2010, using a computer virus called Stuxnet, caused widespread disruption and is reported to have pushed back Iran’s nuclear program by several years. Iranian nuclear scientists have been targeted and killed by US and Israeli intelligence agencies. In November 2020, leading Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed using Israeli artificial intelligence.
The most recent attack on Iran’s nuclear facility comes at a time when negotiations between Iran and the US have been resumed in recent days, over the nuclear deal signed in 2015 by the US, Iran, EU, Britain, China, Russia, France and Germany. The US had unilaterally walked out of this agreement in 2018, and imposed fresh sanctions on Iran, causing severe hardship to its people. US President Joe Biden had presented the restoration of the deal with Iran as one of his main election promises. Israel is opposed to these negotiations and to the restoration of an agreement with Iran and US and other world powers. At a meeting earlier in April, Israeli PM Netanyahu had brazenly stated that “… an agreement like this will not bind us.”
Immediately following the attack on Iran’s nuclear facility, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin flew into Tel Aviv to co-ordinate with the Israeli government. There was no word of condemnation from the US Defence Secretary over the Israeli attack on Iran.
Barely 5 days before the attack on Natanz, Israel carried out a mine attack on an Iranian freighter in the Red Sea. This was the latest in a series of such attacks by Israel on Iranian ships. It was followed by a series of Israeli airstrikes in Syria that damaged a military base near Damascus. Israel last year openly acknowledged that it carried out about 1,000 air strikes on Syria over 8 years.
The US and Israel keep propagating the lie that Iran is a “rogue state” which sponsors terrorism, in order to justify their attacks and embargo on Iran. However, life experience shows that the truth is just the opposite. Facts show that it is not Iran, but the US and its allies including Israel, who are behind the majority of terrorist acts.
The state of Israel was created in 1948 through armed aggression, massacres, ethnic cleansing and cruel displacement of nearly 750,000 Palestinian people from their homeland. It practices savage discrimination and oppression of the Palestinian people, denying them their human rights. With full US backing, Israel regularly carries out and justifies the genocide of the Palestinian people, by branding their just struggle for their national rights as “terrorist”. The US and Israel regularly launch military attacks on countries in the region which oppose US imperialist domination and defend the rights of the Palestinian people to their own homeland.
In pursuit of its strategic aim of domination of West Asia, the US has armed the Israeli state to the teeth, to serve as its strategic ally in the region. Iran is a major roadblock to the plans of the US for establishing its complete domination over the oil-rich West Asia region. That is why the US is relentlessly targeting Iran. The US is doing everything possible to pressurize Iran to give up its sovereign right to pursue its own economic and political course, free from external imperialist interference. It has been building a military coalition of states in West Asia, to attack Iran.
Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facility is an act of war. It is aimed at provoking Iran and wrecking the proposed talks to end the economic sanctions on Iran. The fact that the US did not even condemn the Israeli attack shows that it fits into the US strategy to pressure Iran during the upcoming talks on a new nuclear deal.
US imperialism together with Israel are responsible for the extremely dangerous situation prevailing in West Asia. The Communist Ghadar Party condemns the latest devastating attack by Israel on the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz.