Defend Lebanon! Defeat Israel´s war of terror!

//WORLD REVOLUTION //International Council // August 2006
On the Sunday 30th July as part of its huge military offensive against Lebanon the Israeli army dropped a single massive bomb on the town of Qana killing over 50 innocent civilians who were sheltering for cover in the basement of residential apartments that were destroyed. The Israeli response was a disdainful ‘we told you to leave your homes'. And so they had. The Israeli's had issued a ‘warning' to every citizen of southern Lebanon to get out or face the consequences.

This was nothing less than a call for ethnic cleansing. And the Israeli's got their way with the United Nations estimating that between 500,000 and 700,000 Lebanese people have been displaced and in need of emergency relief.

As the country faces a humanitarian disaster of huge proportions the bombs continued to fall despite promises by Israel and the US state department of a 48 hour ceasefire following the Qana massacre.

Far from scaling down the offensive Israel has stepped it up; calling up 6,000 army reservists and steadily moving ground forces into the south. However, despite over three weeks of fighting and this horrific aerial bombardment the Lebanese, “Islamic Resistance” guerrilla fighters, linked to Hezbollah, have held the line and prevented Israel forces from going more than a few kilometres into the south. Now it is making a more serious push north and east to try to surround and encircle the resistance

Plans for a greater Israel

The Ariel Sharon government in Israel came to power promising a lasting peace on ‘Israeli terms' and brought about by using overwhelmingly military force. It was in principle in favour of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and supported the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza undertaken by the previous government. However, at the same time it redrew Israel's borders annexing whole swathes of land in the West Bank and began the construction of the Apartheid Wall.

Throughout the peace process of the last fifteen years it was clear that any new so called ‘Palestinian State' would be completely militarily and economically subordinate to Israel with no control over its borders and resembling a patch work quilt of disconnected impoverished cities, under Israeli Defence Force encirclement. The plan enforced by Sharon and his chosen successor Ehud Olmet, who leads the new Kadima-Labour coalition government, takes this one step further in that it has actually brought sections of the occupied territories formally into the Israeli state.

The Palestinians have resisted this brutal occupation for nearly fifty years. Historically this resistance was led by Fatah and the PLO, but many Palestinians have grown disillusioned with them because of their concessions to Israel during the ‘peace process' and the corruption of their government officials.

This led to the radical Islamist group Hamas winning the last Palestinian legislative elections in January. The Kadima-Labour government has refused to recognise the new Palestinian administration and is determined to crush Hamas and Islamic Jihad (the other main resistance force) through military force.

The attack on Lebanon has to be seen in this context of a drive for a greater Israel that militarily defeats the forces opposing it (Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad) and secures Israel's military, political and economic dominance over the region. Their aim is to turn Lebanon into a weak disarmed buffer state similar to Jordan while to the south the US will do everything to defend its client dictatorship in Egypt.

The US gives Egypt some $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. All told, Egypt has received over $50 billion since 1975. If Lebanon becomes an Israel friendly state the Palestinians will be cut off from all support and, the Zionists and the Americans hope, forced to accept any terms for a settlement the former chose to offer. In practice it would mean national annihilation for the Palestinians since any state they were offered would be fragmented, disarmed and economically dependent on Israel.

A racist apartheid state

The forced expulsion of Arabs that we have seen in Lebanon is not a new policy for the Israeli ruling class but one on which the very Israeli state was founded. Israel was created between 1947 and 1948 on the backs of the expulsion of between 500 000 – 800 000 Palestinians.

Israel's racist laws allow a Jewish person from any corner of the globe to settle in Israel but deny that same right to the Palestinian refugees previously expelled allow Israel to sustain an artificial majority of Jews thus ensuring an exclusive, racist, apartheid state. Meanwhile, its tanks police the refugee camps of the occupied territories that hold 1.3 million descendents of the expelled with tens of thousands more living in neighbouring Arab states including Lebanon.

Proxy of US imperialism

Each year Israel receives huge sums in economic and military aid from the United States. In 2006 this came to a colossal $2.6 billion mainly in the form of military aid. This direct injection of funds comes on top of loan guarantees that come to some 10 billion dollars a year. Without this injection of money Israel would not be able to sustain its huge military capability that completely outstrips every other power in the region. Indeed Israel has the fourth largest army in the world.

But what does the United States get in return? It gets a proxy military force with which to enforce its economic, political and foreign policy in the Middle East. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan arouse the indignation of the Arab masses forcing their leaders into a more anti-American stance, the US becomes ever more dependent on Israel as the only dependable ally it has in the region.

War on Terror

The terrorist attacks of September 11th gave US imperialism the excuse to go on an offensive to secure its hegemony over the world's people. The unstable Middle East, rich in oil reserves but increasingly hostile to US power had to be tamed. This led to the brutal wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq. It led to the ‘peace process' enforced down the barrel of a gun in Palestine. And, now it means the scorched earth policy for the people of Lebanon.

The invasion of Lebanon marks a beginning of a new phase of intensified conflict. It is an act of desperation arising from the failure to pacify Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine under pro-US regimes. The US and Israel had hoped that the ‘Cedar Revolution' that led to the end of Syrian occupation of Lebanon in 2005 would mean the beginning of the end for the Hezbollah resistance fighters in the south but instead their hold has been consolidated, even winning seats in the new government.

The capturing of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah gave a pretext to the latest invasion. Like the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 it gave imperialism in excuse to trigger the long a long conceived plan. The Israelis don't like to point out that they have thousands of Hezbollah militants held in their jails and in the past have exchanged them for captured Israeli soldiers (as Hezbollah has demanded in this case).

Victory to the resistance!

Israel has invaded and occupied southern Lebanon three times in 1978, 1982 and again in 1996. Hezbollah developed as a guerrilla resistance army to these invasions and the occupations that followed. In the latter two cases it eventually drove out the Israeli occupiers by inflicting heavy casualties on them and convincing them they could never subdue Lebanon. Now they are doing it for a third time. Hezbollah is an Islamist party, committed in its programme to installing an Islamic republic based on Sharia law. Surely revolutionary socialist youth cannot be in favour of this? Indeed not.

We defend a fully secular and democratic state that gives equal rights to women, all religions and nationalities – these are rights that are expected even in most capitalist countries but which Israel's role means it won't guarantee. In fighting for the defeat of Israel we don't drop our fight for socialism, which will extend democratic rights, but show through our solidarity in struggle that we have a common goal with those who are also in struggle and use this position of standing side by side with those in the movement to criticise the wrong and reactionary course presented by its' leaders. Thus we will fight against any attempts to create a state based on religious law – which enshrines inequality between men and women, discriminates against religious minorities, and lays the basis for bigotry and persecution. In Lebanon, a state of minorities, nay attempt to create a confessional state would lead to a nightmarish civil war.

Nevertheless, despite its reactionary politics we support Hezbollah and the Islamic Resistance's fight to drive the Israeli invaders out of Lebanon. Why? Because it is a justified war of national defence against the Zionist state and its US imperialist backers, a war in solidarity with the Palestinian people, also being starved and ethnically cleansed in Gaza and the West Bank. We believe that all socialists should support and as far as is possible participate in the struggle to drive out Israel, alongside the Hezbollah fighters.

In short, wherever there is a fight to drive out the Israelis and the United States and UK occupiers (in Iraq, in Afghanistan) socialists must participate in an anti-imperialist united front. This does not mean for one minute dropping our criticism of the Islamists reactionary social and political objectives. Certainly we do not want to see them seize power. However, unless working class forces participate fully in the struggle against imperialism and indeed come to the head of the struggle, then Islamic republics are the most likely outcome of the struggles now underway - that or the defeat of the movement by imperialism and its agents.

Anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, worldwide must rally to the struggle to defeat the US and UK and their Zionist agency in the Middle East. The struggles in the Middle East and Central Asia are the modern Vietnam War. Imperialism has launched its “endless war” to seize the enormous wealth, its huge oil reserves, and in order to convince the oppressed and exploited worldwide that there is no alternative but submission to global capitalism and the United States as a self appointed world policeman.

Yet Hezbollah, the Palestinian and Iraqi resistance and the antiwar movement around the world have shown this is a pack of lies. Imperialism can be resisted. It can be defeated. It can be overthrown. To do the latter - so that these “endless” wars can come to an end - we need a worldwide movement, a worldwide organisation to coordinate the fightback and go onto the offensive.

That is why we in Revolution are fighting to unite young people worldwide in a revolutionary Youth International and the working class in a new party of social revolution – a Fifth International!