Simone McDonnell

Israel’s war on Lebanon: ‘a mortal threat to the whole region’

How can the devastating cycle of imperialist invasions, genocide, exploitation and authoritarian rule that has been inflicted on the people of the Middle East be ended? There is profound sympathy among the workers and the poor of the Arab world for the Palestinian cause, but the brutal dictators who rule Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria have held popular mobilisations in check. There is a burning need for a socialist left that can galvanise the masses into action.
The Arab Spring revolution that swept the region just over a decade ago showed the potential for rebellion against these detested regimes. But today the region’s once powerful left is very weak because of the disastrous failure of the Stalinism that long dominated its politics.
If a socialist left is to be built with some hope of liberating the workers of the Middle East and winning freedom for the Palestinian people, then it is vital to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinist class-collaborationist politics and rebuild on a genuinely revolutionary basis.
Prior to the 1930s, the Arab Communist parties were tiny. In the early 1930s, the original Communist leaders, who were genuine working-class revolutionaries, were purged and the parties thoroughly Stalinised. New leaders trained in Moscow loyally carried out the dictates of Russian foreign policy—the policy of the counter-revolutionary regime that had destroyed workers’ power in Russia.
The last thing Russia’s rulers wanted were workers’ revolutions that would threaten their imperialist interests. For Stalin and his supporters, the role of Arab Communists was to find allies for Russia, not to advance working-class interests.
From the mid-1930s, Moscow directed Communists to adopt a class-collaborationist popular front policy that subordinated the interests of workers and peasants to the supposedly progressive national bourgeoisie. As the Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bakdash put it in 1943: 
“We assure the national capitalist, the national factory owner, that we do not look with envy or with malice on his national enterprise. On the contrary, we desire his progress and vigorous growth ... We assure the owner of land that we do not and shall not demand the confiscation of his property ... All we ask is kindness towards the peasant.”
This approach totally contradicted the genuine Marxist tradition. Compare Bakdash’s statement with what Lenin argued about how revolutionaries should relate to their local capitalists in 1920: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in colonial countries, but must not merge with it and must under all circumstances preserve the independence of the proletarian movement, even if in its most rudimentary form”.
The precise form of the popular front varied over time, and the section of the bourgeoisie that was considered progressive could also change dramatically. During World War Two, Moscow told Arab Communists to back the war effort of Stalin’s British allies. Consequently, Communists opposed strikes by workers. And in the eyes of the Stalinists, the bourgeois Arab forces that continued to support the struggle against British and French colonial rule went from being progressive allies to outright fascists.
Later, the main task was to curry favour with the new nationalist Arab regimes. Moscow spelt it out in 1960:
“At the head of the majority of new national states ... stand bourgeois political leaders ... However, this cannot belittle the progressive historical importance of the breakthrough that has taken place ... [T]he central task ... remains for a comparatively long period of time that of struggle not against capital but against survivals of the Middle Ages. From this stems the possibility of the cooperation over a long period of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia ... with that part of the national bourgeoisie which is interested in the independent political and economic development of its country and is ready to defend its independence against any encroachments by the imperialist powers.”
But no section of the Arab bourgeoisie, even supposedly radical leaders like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, was prepared to mobilise the masses for a determined fight against imperialism. In June 1969, Gaddafi opposed a popular war of liberation to free Palestine. He argued that the Palestinian guerrilla movement must rid itself of “ideologies” and operate only according to the strategy laid down by Arab governments.
The popular front approach had an incredibly damaging impact. It led to repeated defeats for the working-class movement. In Iraq following the popular revolution of July 1958 that overthrew the monarchy, the Communists built mass working-class support and dominated the student movement. But despite intensified repression, the Iraqi Communist Party tailed behind the government of General Kassem, which supposedly represented the “national bourgeoisie”. The failure to mobilise workers to fight for power led to a crushing defeat, with at least 5,000 Communists murdered and thousands more sacked from their jobs and sent to prison by the lorry load.
The Communists learned nothing from this disaster. In the 1970s, Iraqi Communist Party members took cabinet posts in the authoritarian Ba’athist government until Saddam Hussein had them hanged.
In Egypt, the Communists initially denounced Abdul Nasser’s nationalist regime as “fascist” after it executed striking workers. But once Nasser developed friendly relations with Moscow, the Communists became cheerleaders for his regime despite the fact Nasser was imprisoning Communist Party leaders. The Egyptian Communists eventually dissolved their party into the highly authoritarian ruling party.
In Lebanon during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, the Communists refused to establish democratic control by workers over the sectors of Beirut the party’s armed wing dominated, instead tailing behind the bourgeois nationalist forces. They even went so far as to adopt communalist slogans that served to divide the working class. In Syria, the Communists were absorbed into the Assad regime’s totalitarian state apparatus, occupying minor cabinet posts. This disoriented the working-class movement, tying it to the exploiters and impeding the possibility of independent working-class actions to defend living standards and democratic rights.
Despite these repeated failures, popular-front-style class-collaborationist politics rather than clear-cut class politics in one form or another remained hegemonic on the Arab left for decades. In Palestine, the popular front approach meant that in the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was unable to offer a class-struggle alternative to the reactionary Arab leadership of landlords and clerics. And because the PCP abandoned class politics for nationalism, it was in a weaker position to hold the line against Zionism among its Jewish worker members (who were a majority of members in the 1930s).
The end result was the formation of two Communist parties in British mandate Palestine. One party, predominantly Jewish in composition, tailed Zionism. The other party, predominantly Palestinian in composition, tailed Arab nationalism.
In 1947, Moscow backed the setting up of the Zionist state as it saw Israel as a potential ally. This had a disastrous impact on Communist parties throughout the Arab world.
The membership of the joint Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, which had built substantial support during a postwar strike wave, collapsed from 18,000 in 1947 to just a few hundred. Dissidents who opposed Moscow’s pro-Zionist line were expelled. Consequently, Communists were in no position to take advantage of the wave of strikes and protests that rocked Syria after the failure of the Arab regimes to defend Palestine. 
The Communists were discredited for many years among Palestinians driven from their land. This explains why the Palestinian left that developed in the 1960s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), were not direct descendants of the old PCP, but had quite different origins.
The tragedy was that when these groups groped towards Marxism, the predominant ideas on offer were still those of Stalinism. They ended up embracing a popular front approach, as reflected in the names of their organisations, and with all the same problems.
The official Communist Party did retain some influence among Arabs within the state of Israel. It was, however, a reformist party committed to the Zionist state. And the PCP on the West Bank was a conservative force promoting a two-state solution.
The new Palestinian left of the 1960s originated in the Arab National Movement (ANM), which originated among a group of intellectuals at the American University of Beirut, the most prominent of whom were George Habash and Wadi Haddad. The ANM was a highly secretive organisation that had an elitist approach of armed struggle by small bands of guerrillas. It viewed armed actions as a means to pressure the Arab states to launch a war against Israel.
In its early years, the ANM was conservative politically and, reflecting the upper-middle-class social backgrounds of its members, hostile to working-class politics, which it viewed as disrupting Arab national unity. After 1957, the ANM looked to Nasser’s regime in Egypt to unite the Arab world and drive out the imperialists and Zionists.
The crushing defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war with Israel discredited Nasserism. The ANM condemned Nasser’s regime as petty bourgeois rather than socialist and began to look to the Vietnamese model. In December 1967, George Habash established the PFLP based on a version of Stalinised Marxism looking to Cuba and China. Then in February 1969, the Democratic Front split from the PFLP. 
Initially, the Democratic Front, influenced by New Left ideas and with a following among Palestinian students in Europe and the US, was the more leftish and open group. Some Palestinian Trotskyists exiled in Europe joined. The Democratic Front strongly rejected Arab chauvinism (and slogans such as drive the Jews into the sea, which was still influential in the 1960s) and placed less emphasis on militarism than the PFLP, which in 1969 and 1970 engaged in a series of plane hijackings and hostage takings.
The DFLP called for the “establishment of a democratic state in which Arabs and Jews shall enjoy equal national rights and responsibilities”
as part of a federal socialist state of the whole region. It sought links with the Israeli Trotskyist group Matzpen. 
In 1970, during the mass upheavals in Jordan, both the DFLP and the PFLP raised the slogan “All power to the resistance” and called for a socialist state. But after the Black September crushing of the resistance, the DFLP moved to the right, purging its more left-wing members and moving towards a more pro-Moscow orientation.
This explains why the DFLP, which had participated in the Left Front in the Lebanese civil war and had been critical of the PLO’s failure to launch an all-out struggle against the far-right Lebanese forces, largely dropped out of the fighting once Russia’s ally Syria invaded Lebanon. The main game for Moscow was its relationship with Arab regimes like Syria. That meant that the interests of Arab and Palestinian Communists were always going to be sacrificed.
The Russians were also keen to develop a relationship with Fatah, the mainstream leadership of the PLO. From the late 1970s, the Russians gave the group substantial funding and arms. Consequently, a strong pro-Moscow Stalinist current developed within Fatah.
The DFLP began to popularise the idea of a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. By the early 1970s, sections of the Fatah leadership supported the idea but faced opposition within their ranks, so they were happy for the DFLP to be the stalking horse for the idea.
The DFLP was smaller than the PFLP and had less of a base in the refugee camps. But it had an ideological impact on left-wing intellectual circles in the Arab world. In the early 1970s, it published an influential weekly paper in Beirut with the Lebanese Communist Action Organisation. This enabled it to play an important role in rallying sections of the secular Arab intelligentsia to support a two-state position. It was a slippery slope. The end result was that the DFLP became little more than a left cover for Fatah’s betrayals. 
The PFLP was hostile to “Arab reaction”, represented in its view by feudalism and capitalism, particularly the rulers of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. But it was much less critical of the supposed radical Arab regimes such as Algeria, South Yemen, Syria and, at times, Iraq.
In March 1969, George Habash attacked the DFLP as suffering from “infantile leftism”. “We are not as against Arab regimes as they are”, he argued. “We criticise but collaborate with Arab regimes, as Mao did with the Kuomintang against the Japanese threat in China.”
But so-called radical regimes like Algeria, Syria and Iraq were far from reliable allies of the Palestinian masses. Their approach was not qualitatively different from that of Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. By tying themselves to these regimes, the PFLP downplayed the need to build a mass revolutionary movement from below throughout the Arab world. The PFLP ended up providing left cover for regimes like the Ba’ath in Iraq and Syria.
So, while the PFLP called itself Marxist-Leninist and talked a lot about the role of the masses and the working class, this became little more than a rhetorical incantation as it sought alliances with various non-proletarian forces.
In 1970, Habash went to China and North Korea to win support, and the Chinese began to send the PFLP considerable amounts of arms. But this was at a cost, as the Chinese opposed the PFLP’s attacks on conservative Arab regimes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, with which China was trying to curry favour.
After the defeat of the Arab states in the 1973 war with Israel, Yasser Arafat openly backed the proposal for a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. In response, the PFLP and other groups formed the Rejection Front, which was also backed by the Iraqi regime.
Opposition to a mini-state had a resonance among intellectuals and students and in some refugee camps in Lebanon (after all, the refugees would get nothing out of setting up a state in the Occupied Territories). However, by 1978 Iraq was moving to cosy up to the conservative Arab regimes and it consequently went cold on the Rejection Front, which went into a marked decline.
Despite tensions and battles with Fatah, the PFLP refused to break decisively with the Fatah-dominated PLO and called for the national unity of all Palestinian groups. In other words, despite declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist organisation, the PFLP consistently put nation before class. It sought to unite with the bourgeois-dominated Fatah rather than build a class-struggle alternative to Fatah’s betrayals of Palestinian workers and peasants.
The PFLP came to operate as a ginger group within the PLO rather than trying to build a clear socialist leadership alternative to Fatah. This led the PFLP, on several occasions, to fudge its opposition to official PLO policy in the interests of preserving national unity. 
Eventually, the PFLP toned down its opposition to a two-state solution. It came to accept it as inevitable, and when the Palestinian Authority was established, it chose to operate within its framework.
The failure of the PFLP, the DFLP and the official Communist parties to build a class-struggle alternative to the rightward-moving Fatah demoralised their supporters. The demoralisation was further compounded by the collapse of the Russian bloc, which all of the Arab left had mistakenly looked to as socialist. 
This opened the space for the rise of the Islamists, who cohered around them a new generation of Palestinians who wanted to fight. But the Islamists were incapable of offering a road forward and, just like Fatah, led the Palestinian people down the road to further defeats.
A new revolutionary left needs to be built in Palestine and the broader Arab world that bases itself on a clear rejection of all forms of alliances with capitalist forces. A left that puts working-class unity ahead of national unity. A left that has no truck with any of the Arab regimes, whether so-called progressive or reactionary. A left that fights for working-class leadership of the struggle against Zionism and imperialism. One that seeks to rally the urban poor, the peasantry and the refugees behind the working class and recognises that freedom for the Palestinian people can be won only by a socialist revolution that sweeps away both the Zionist state and the bourgeois Arab states.

Mick Armstrong

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Palestine has now brought the Middle East to the brink of regional catastrophe. But if you open up a newspaper in the West, you’ll read that the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East is the victim of aggression from its neighbours, including one it has just invaded for the fourth time. And while Israel is doing nothing but “defending itself”, its regional rival Iran is being painted as enemy number one. 
The irony is that Iran was once a vital US ally in the Middle East. The post-WW2 period was a golden age of US influence in Iran, during which control over the spigot of Iranian oil was transferred from the British to the US empire. 
In 1953, the US sponsored a coup against progressive nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent the nationalisation of Iranian oilfields. In the following decade, Iran became increasingly authoritarian. The anti-communist and pro-Western king, or shah, was a welcome friend to the US in an era when pan-Arab nationalism was threatening US interests in the Arab states. 
In 1979, a revolution swept aside the hated shah. The revolution, which had opened up the possibility of liberation for workers, women and oppressed minorities, was ultimately hijacked by the clerics, who implemented a new authoritarian state, the Islamic Republic. Unlike the previous autocracy, this regime did not ally with US imperialism, instead presenting itself as intractably hostile to US influence in the Middle East. 
Iran’s anti-Western posture has given a measure of popularity to an otherwise despised regime. And no wonder, given the US has long been the greatest purveyor of violence and instability in the Middle East. 
As a rival capitalist power, Iran has benefited from anti-US feeling and from the US’s strategic failures in the region, particularly during the “War on Terror”. Iran’s major rival, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was removed from power by the US in 2003, and Iran was able to take advantage of the power vacuum created when the US proved unable to establish a pro-Western government. 
Iran’s regional influence was also boosted by the defeat of Israel in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an independent militia strategically allied to Iran, following Israel’s invasion in 2006. In the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Iran also carried out military interventions to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with the support of Hezbollah, and sponsored the Houthis in Yemen against local forces and a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states. 
Renewed Iranian influence has presented a strategic dilemma for US imperialism. In the last 15 years, there has been debate in the US ruling class about whether confrontation or containment is the best approach. The Obama-era Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 represented a pragmatic response to the failure of US occupations in the Middle East. The deal sought to balance overwhelming US military superiority and deterrence with a partial loosening of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a commitment to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The motivation for the deal was hardly peacenik: Obama was attempting to tie up loose ends in the Middle East the better to carry out a “pivot to Asia” and prepare for war with China. 
In the intervening years, Trump tore up the nuclear deal and carried out the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Aside from plying their ally Israel with weapons and levelling ever greater sanctions on Iran’s economy, the US has not had a coherent strategy for confronting or containing Iran. 
There is no shortage of anti-Iranian hawks in the US today. When asked in an interview with 60 Minutes what country represents the “greatest adversary” to the US, Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris claimed that Iran was the “obvious” answer. At a campaign event in North Carolina, Donald Trump encouraged Israel to strike Iranian territory to “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later”.
And while there are no doubt differences of opinion in the US elite about Israeli strikes on Iran—whether to avoid hitting oil infrastructure, which would risk destabilising oil prices, and whether to avoid attacks on nuclear facilities, for example—if Israel decides to strike, the US will back it. 
It is absurd to suggest today, as so many in Israel and the West do, that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. The opposite is true. Israel has never been more secure. The Gulf states have all but normalised relations, Egypt maintains the barbaric blockade on the Rafah crossing into Gaza, and Jordan shoots down Iranian rockets to defend Israel. Israel, on the other hand, poses an existential threat to any neighbour that finds itself at odds with US imperialism. 
A comparison of their military capacities and security alliances shows a stark gulf between them. Israel is a rich, nuclear-armed power with the backing of US imperialism and spends nearly three times Iran’s annual military budget. Iran is a relatively weak power, strained under the weight of crippling US sanctions. This is not the clashing of two comparable powers but an attempt to assert full spectrum US and Israeli dominance in the Middle East, which should be resolutely opposed. If war emerges between Israel, backed by the US, and Iran, socialists should be for Israel’s defeat.
Iran’s government is an authoritarian capitalist regime that brutally oppresses its own population. Animosity from the US and Israel does not make it progressive. The anti-government protests and strikes that accompanied the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 were a positive development that required solidarity. Opposition to an attack on Iran, and the desire to see Israel roundly defeated, does not reflect political support for the Iranian regime, just as opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not imply support for Saddam Hussein. 
Now as then, anti-war activists in the West have a responsibility to reject the lies and expose the hypocrisy of Israel and the West’s wars—current and threatened—in the Middle East.

Chloe Rafferty

How Iran became Western enemy number one

The children of the stones 
have scattered our papers 
spilled ink on our clothes 
mocked the banality of old texts ... 
What matters about 
the children of the stones 
Is that they have brought us rain after centuries of thirst 
Brought us the sun after centuries of darkness, 
Brought us hope after centuries of defeat ... 
The most important 
thing about them is that they have rebelled 
against the authority of their fathers.
Nizar Qabbani—Syrian poet
The First Intifada was one of the deepest and longest-lasting rebellions of Palestinians against Israeli oppression in history. It was known as the “uprising of stones”. 
The emblematic figure of the Intifada was the youth, hurling rocks, head covered by a keffiyeh, standing defiant against Israeli tanks. This figure represented a break from the militarised forms of Palestinian resistance that had dominated in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Intifada involved hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and even inside Israel, and represented a broad and deep radicalisation of the Palestinian population. It involved resistance, civil disobedience, strikes and protests. 
Stories from journalists at the time reveal the breadth of popular involvement. American Ramallah-based journalist Joe Stork described how a middle-aged working-class woman, after watching demonstrations on television for a month, eagerly joined a group of young boys building a roadblock. 
Another article described a toothless 100-year-old woman admitted to a Gaza hospital after having her hand broken by Israeli soldiers. As she entered the ward, she sat up on the bed and gave a speech of defiance to the applause of other victims in surrounding beds.
Over the course of the six years, there were times when the Intifada managed to achieve something like dual power. Palestinian popular committees took over significant elements of civil society and social infrastructure. This was all in response to increased Israeli control and brutalisation of Palestinians in the preceding decades.
After Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank following the 1967 war, the intensification of military rule became unbearable. These conditions provoked extreme resentment amongst the Palestinians, and, throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, there was an increase in organisation. Students played a leading role, with universities starting community programs and organising protests. Strikes began to occur with greater frequency as all Palestinian factions turned toward organising workers. 
The immediate event that sparked the Intifada occurred in Gaza on 9 December 1987. An Israeli army tank drove into a line of cars of Arab workers who had just passed one of the military checkpoints at the northern entrance to the Gaza Strip. Four were crushed to death and seven were seriously injured. The crime was witnessed by hundreds of labourers returning from jobs in Israel. 
Three of the dead men were from the nearby Jabalia refugee camp. Their funerals turned into a huge demonstration of 10,000 camp residents. From this moment onwards, the residents of the camp referred to it as the “camp of the revolution”. 
The killings sparked waves of similar actions across the refugee camps, home to the poorest and most oppressed Palestinians. One young resident in Gaza said: “We were waiting to do such an uprising. Everyone here has a demonstration inside their heart”. 
The insurgence of the early demonstrations provoked a violent reaction from the Israeli military. Hundreds of young people were arbitrarily arrested. The military picked them up and imprisoned them. Eventually, the Israelis converted an army camp on the edge of Gaza city into a new place to hold young men. Palestinians dubbed it “Ansar II” after the notorious POW camp Israel set up in southern Lebanon. Ansar II became infamous for its sadistic treatment of Palestinians, which included clubbing prisoners while they were shackled to the ground. 
Curfews were introduced; telephone lines, water and electricity were cut. Administrative detention was introduced, and activists were deported. 
By 1988, Israel was sending 10,000 troops every day into the West Bank and Gaza, using more soldiers than in their conquest in 1967. By the end of 1988, more than 30,000 Palestinians had been detained and hundreds killed.
This initial phase of the uprising was primarily a war of the camps versus the army, but by mid-January 1988, the villages also became centres of resistance. Women and the young were at the centre of the rebellion. There were stories about boys, so young that they had to stand on their tiptoes to look through car windows, staffing the Palestinian checkpoints established by the uprising. Women routinely attacked Israeli patrols with pots and pans to release detained youths. Outside one Ramallah prison in late 1988, three women claimed an arrested youth, explaining: “They are all our sons”. This phrase became a refrain throughout the whole of the Intifada. Women even talked about protecting their “sons” as their profession. 
All this resistance would have been significant enough, but the rebellion deepened and expanded in a variety of ways. Tax strikes were organised and Israeli goods boycotted.
Importantly, workers began to mobilise. Over the decades, the numbers of Palestinian workers working low-wage jobs in the West Bank and as day labourers inside Israel had increased. Wage workers became a larger part of the Palestinian population overall, and unions grew. One union official estimated in 1985 that, out of 150,000 workers in the West Bank, around 30,000 were members of a union. 
Strikes became a regular feature of the Intifada. In late December 1987, a general strike of Palestinian workers occurred across all the Occupied Territories. Israeli profits collapsed in a variety of sectors, including hospitality, construction and fruit farming. 
The organisation of workers was not, however, unified. There were several union federations and blocs organised along political lines—many of whom were competing for members. 
Other committees were also established: youth committees, medical committees, popular and neighbourhood committees, and local defence committees.
The neighbourhood and popular committees became responsible for the running of basic infrastructure, including health, education and rubbish collection. When schools were shut down by military order, the committees established alternative schools with a whole new curriculum. 
These committees did more than help organise different elements of society. They started to give political and social confidence in new ways. Many of the generational and class relations were shifting. The class forces that had dominated society, like intellectuals and professionals, began to seem marginal. There were open challenges to old leaders and old hierarchies. 
The idea behind many of these committees was to disengage from existing Israeli structures and lay the basis for Palestinian statehood. Or, according to Salim Tamari, “To prepare the Occupied Territories to receive the national authority.” 
While the early months of the Intifada were led by a combination of local spontaneous action and pre-existing formations, a more formal political leadership coalesced in early 1988. This was called the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). Outside of the UNLU, and with growing influence, were the Islamist factions: Islamic Jihad and Hamas. 
The UNLU directed the course of the uprising through a series of communiqués. These communiqués, particularly in the early years of the uprising, would give each day of the week ahead a particular focus. They were distributed at night, on the ground or tucked under car windshields or doors. The directives were assiduously followed. 
The UNLU comprised both a political leadership on the ground in the Occupied Territories and also the leadership amongst the diaspora. The diasporic leadership developed a broader strategic orientation. The early articulated goals of the movement were to hold an international peace conference that could push for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The UNLU was mainly run by the organisations affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). This included the increasingly dominant Fateh, led by Yasser Arafat. Fateh was a compromised and conservative nationalist organisation. Its horizons were shaped simultaneously by its cosy relationships with despotic regional powers and a desire for a Palestinian mini-state. The other main factions were the Maoist-influenced leftist organisations of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Later, the Communist Party joined. 
All these factions organised their own committees and trade unions. While there were often sharp disagreements between the factions on a range of questions, all held to a generally nationalist framework. In the unions, this meant that the class struggle should be frozen in the interests of a “nationalist alliance” between workers and bosses in the Occupied Territories. An independent Palestinian state needed to be established before the class struggle could begin. Such a political approach meant that, although the unions were a vital element of the Intifada, the workers movement did not fundamentally shape the political contours of the popular committees. This was a missed opportunity. By the end of the first year of the Intifada, there was such a consensus that the popular committees were the basis for a Palestinian state that there may well have been room to argue that an expanded and deepened version of popular power, workers power, was necessary. 
But even if such a view was in a minority, it was the right argument to make. National independence, while important, does not bring genuine liberation for the nationally oppressed working class. Indeed, twentieth century postcolonial states have often become hell-scapes for workers. Workers needed to fight for the struggle for national independence to become a struggle for socialism.
The Intifada inspired other regional uprisings in Algeria, Jordan and the Gulf States. These rebellions weren’t just in solidarity with Palestine: they challenged the regional order. This was something that the Fateh leadership could not countenance. So much of their existence and power was dependent on funding and support from these regimes. They began to codify a policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of the Arab regimes.
The resilience of the popular movement was also considered potentially problematic by the Fateh leadership. While Fateh understood the popular committees as providing the infrastructure for a future Palestinian state, they did not approve of their radicalising dynamic. Fateh saw the mass movement only as a lever for its own power plays. 
In the wake of the Intifada, the Israeli and US ruling classes felt that they were unable to continue ruling in the old way. Much better to find a collaborationist Palestinian leadership. Fateh happily obliged, thus beginning the disastrous Oslo Accords that ended in the establishment of the traitorous Palestinian Authority. 
Both the DFLP and the PFLP, in differing ways and at different paces, challenged elements of this trajectory, while nevertheless maintaining their fundamental commitment to the PLO and its institutions. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on the other hand, maintained a strident objection to the notion of a Palestinian mini-state, and this objection stood them in good stead for the later betrayals. 
At the same time, between 1991 and 1993, the Israeli arrest and killing campaigns eliminated many leading activists. This repression occurred while Fateh was deliberately fragmenting the movement. Arafat allocated PLO funds to institutions and personnel according to political loyalty, much to the detriment of genuine resistance activities. These two factors ultimately contributed to the decline of the mass character of the Intifada.
Tragically, the promise of the Intifada was lost. It was crushed by an Israeli state that was determined to continue its rule over the Palestinians in whatever way it could, by violence and
negotiation. 
The Intifada was also betrayed by a Palestinian leadership that preferred to chase the dream of a Palestinian capitalist state in which its own power and prestige would be safeguarded. Finally, all that brilliant defiant energy was squandered by a left that refused to try to carve out a different, more radical path: a path that was certainly more difficult, but that centred working-class resistance in the Occupied Territories, that argued for regional revolution and looked to the power of the masses rather than the power of states.

Vashti Fox

Sun after darkness: The First Intifada

Jerome Small

What’s driving Israel’s wars?

Israeli soldiers describe the Zionist state’s vast network of prisons as “hell”. In them, at least 9,600 Palestinians are held hostage, almost half of whom were detained “without trial, without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves”, according to a report published in August by Israel-based human rights organisation B’Tselem. 
Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as Network of Torture contains 55 testimonies from Palestinians released since 7 October. Despite their being only a fraction of the imprisoned population, their stories shine light on a brutal apparatus of physical and psychological terror designed in every facet to crush the Palestinian people. 
Since 7 October, Israel’s prison system has operated under a “prison state of emergency”. Even the most basic inmate rights—such as the right to speak to a lawyer and family—have been stripped away. 
Accounts of beatings at the hands of guards and mauling by dogs come up again and again in the report. And some 60 Palestinians have been killed in custody in the past year. Take the case of Arafat Hamdan, a diabetic held in Ofer Prison in the West Bank. When his health rapidly deteriorated, his cellmates called guards for help. 
“The guard said Arafat needed food and drink, and I told him we had nothing to feed him. He said to wait for breakfast”, Muhammad Srur, a 34-year-old father of two from the West Bank village of Ni’lin, recounted. But by breakfast, Arafat was dead.
Israel’s torture regime is designed to degrade and humiliate to a level of detail so sophisticated that only the cruellest mind could have conceived it. 
Twelve to fourteen prisoners are crammed into cells designed for six. Prisoners are forced to eat spoiled food. One testimony describes having only six slices of bread to eat per day. Another relates how they were forced to eat mouldy yoghurt. 
“For 191 days, I didn’t see the sun”, Thaer Halahleh recounts. 
Sami Khalili, who spent twenty years in Israel’s prisons, had letters from his late mother confiscated. Olive oil and spices that he and his fellow inmates had previously used to cook for themselves were destroyed. Routinely, guards attempt to force Palestinians to kiss the Israeli flag or sing Zionist songs. Refusal, the response of many, is met with hails of fists and batons. 
“Once, when a detainee in the cell next to ours asked to swap his yogurt because the expiration date had passed, they punished all the inmates in the cell: they set dogs on them, beat them with clubs, dragged them to the bathroom and beat them up”, Hisham Saleh recounted. “The next day, I could still see their blood on the floor.”
Long before the “prison state of emergency”, the carceral system had been a pillar of apartheid. Before Israel’s genocidal campaign began last year, 5,192 Palestinians languished in the regime’s vast prison network. Israel employs a series of categories to imprison Palestinians without even a pretence of due process. Administrative detention is one of the most notorious. Human rights group Amnesty International defines it as:
“A form of detention under which individuals are detained by state authorities based on secret security grounds that the defendant and their lawyer cannot review, effectively circumventing due process guaranteed for all persons deprived of their liberty under international law.” 
Nearly 40 percent of Palestinian men, and 20 percent of the population, spend time in Israel’s prisons at some point in their lives. Few families are untouched by the system’s vast reach. Having served prison time is one of the legal bases for being denied working rights inside Israel, amounting to de facto discrimination for the “crime” of being Palestinian.
Welcome to Hell is a reminder that apartheid is not simply a government policy in Israel. It is embedded in the structure of the state. Judicial, military and prison apparatuses are structured to oppress and discriminate against the Palestinian people. Their apartheid function is established by more than just legislation. 
Even the most rudimentary legal “rights” for Palestinians are rendered meaningless by the racist structure of the state apparatus. Muhammad Srur’s description of his attempt, in a court hearing, to appeal his treatment at the hands of guards illustrates this:
“I also spoke about how we were brutally attacked and abused by the guards during transfers, but the judge didn’t pay attention to that. After the hearing, on the way to the cell, the IPS [Israel Prison Service] people took revenge on me for complaining about their behavior. They hit and kicked me brutally the whole way.”
Under far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, apartheid is open policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal regime has given the state apparatus licence to commit any and every act of violence. The “prison state of emergency” has emboldened and strengthened the far-right government’s allies in the state machine. Negev Prison chief Brigadier General Yosef Knipes explained as much to the conservative Orthodox magazine Mishpacha: 
“We can categorically say that the new policy and the tone set from the top are good for us—the executive authority. When government-level officials back decisions and give the professionals in the field the powers needed to get the job done properly, it produces the desired outcomes.”
A change in government will not fundamentally alter these institutions, not least because every significant party is committed to apartheid. As the report concludes: “Minister Ben Gvir’s influence remains evident, but his policy could not have been implemented without the cooperation of the entire system”. 
Liberation for Palestine means the dismantling of the whole system of apartheid between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Jack Mansell

‘Welcome to hell’—the barbarity of Israel’s prisons

If Israel were a person, they would combine the worst traits of Donald Trump, George W. Bush and a bloviating campus progressive: a pathological liar with a penchant for mass murder who weaponises the politics of identity to shut down political challenges. 
Yet arguably worse than Israel is its friendship circle, which repeats every lie as truth and defends, excuses or enables every act of depravity on the part of its obnoxious pal.
In Gaza, more than 41,000 people are confirmed killed, more than 10,000 are missing and presumed dead, and nearly 100,000 have been injured. And now Lebanon is being hammered as well.
The crushing <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/eyewitness-to-genocide">testimony of Dr Mohammed Mustafa in the latest issue of Red Flag</a>, describing the mounting toll of malnutrition and hepatitis A on children, is yet another reminder of the barbarity Israel is inflicting in the territory.
One year into the genocidal offensive, the figures indicate clearly that the entire Gaza Strip is being made uninhabitable.
Most of the 2.2 million residents have now been herded into just 11 percent of the territory—roughly 39 square kilometres. 
Ninety-six percent of the population—2.15 million people—are facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. Almost half a million are in what the World Food Programme defines as “catastrophic conditions”. 
More than two-thirds of permanent crop fields have been significantly degraded or destroyed.
Two in every three buildings are damaged or destroyed.
Two-thirds of the road network has been damaged, and nearly 1,200 kilometres of roads have been destroyed.
Almost 93 percent of schools have been damaged, and 85 percent need “full reconstruction or major rehabilitation work” to be used again, according to a research group led by the UN and British charity Save the Children.
The United Nations and aid agencies have labelled the situation “beyond catastrophic”. In May, the International Criminal Court prosecutor applied for arrest warrants to try Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in August that blocking humanitarian aid is “justified and moral” even if it wipes out the entire population of Gaza.
Yet not only have Israel’s friends stood by this rogue state, not only have they continued to provide military and diplomatic support (US President Joe Biden denounced the request for arrest warrants as “outrageous”), but they have routinely smeared opponents of genocide as antisemites.
On one level, it’s an indication that Israel and its Western backers have lost the argument. If a position cannot prevail through reason, bring in the censors and try to silence the critics through force. 
Yet it exposes more than a failure of the “Enlightenment values” routinely invoked as the reason for the West’s need to prepare for and wage war. 
As Israel expands its offensive into Lebanon, predictably with zero threat of sanctions from its friends, the true nature of global capitalism has again been revealed: the “rules-based order” is a fig leaf under which economic competition for profits and state competition for territorial influence regularly spill over into conflicts with few rules—just the exercise of brute force until someone emerges victorious.
“It is no longer the liberty, unity, and state-independence of each nation that is the ideal of capitalism, but the subjugation of millions of members of foreign peoples to the rule of one’s own nation”, Otto Bauer wrote in his 1907 work The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy. 
“Each nation is to arm itself to the teeth in order to be able to maintain its oppression of the subjugated peoples at all times and to keep foreign rivals away from its own sphere of exploitation.”
It is the age of criminals parading as saviours: permanent war, unpunished mass murder and permanent hypocrisy. 
In the competition for power, Israel today is the pre-eminent rogue state. But it would be nothing without its friends.

Editors

Israel: a rogue state with many friends

Dr Mohammed Mustafa is an emergency trainee doctor who went to Khan Younis in June to volunteer in Gaza’s Nasser and European hospitals. From a Palestinian refugee family, Dr Mustafa trained in medicine in Britain and Australia. Now returned to Perth, he spoke to Red Flag’s Danica Rachel about his experience providing medical aid in the besieged Gaza Strip. 
 
Most people are now, unfortunately, familiar with all the awful statistics of the genocide. No doubt you were as well before you arrived in Gaza. But, beyond the numbers, what weren’t you prepared for? 
When we first entered Gaza, it hit you within the first 200, 300 metres. There were dead bodies on the ground near aid that had fallen off aid trucks. People, out of desperation, go and try to pick up this aid, and if they’re in an area that’s a combat zone, or even if they’re not in a combat zone, get shot by a sniper and killed. 
There’s smoke everywhere from the debris, and there’s thousands of people on the roads by the bombed-out buildings. They all had lived there, but now the homes are destroyed, and they’re just sleeping on the streets. You could see how desperate the situation was. There’s no electricity, no running water, there’s barely any food, and there’s hundreds of thousands of people crammed in very small spaces with nowhere to live and no access to any sanitation.
My first full day, we had a mass casualty event in the first hour and a half. There was a drone strike on a playground. There were about twelve children that were injured. Five of them were dead on arrival. Three of them were bleeding out on the floor.
I looked at the other doctors and we realised that we just didn’t have the equipment, the supplies, the expertise, the operating theatres to help these children. 
I told one of the nurses just to comfort a child on the floor. And that’s all she did. She just sat, she put this child’s head in her lap, and she just stroked his head as he was taking his last breath. He took about four minutes on the floor, where he was just in agony until he died. And I could see that in the corner of my eye, as we’re trying to resuscitate another child. 
 
Famine and extreme hunger are now widespread, and the UN has accused Israel of carrying out a targeted starvation campaign. What does this look like for a doctor on the ground?
There was a massive hepatitis A outbreak, to the point where even doctors with hepatitis A and jaundice were still working. Hepatitis A is usually a self-eliminating disease. But when you’ve been malnourished for nine months, and you’re a child, and you’ve got the constant cortisol release from the anxiety of constant bombs and artillery shells going off, that hepatitis A is going to have a massive effect. 
We were seeing children coming in with liver failure. There was one girl, she was 14 years old. We managed to do a blood test on her, which we don’t usually get to do, and her blood was more acidic than it should have been. When I shined a light in her eye, her pupils weren’t responding to light, which essentially meant she was brain dead. And she’s brain dead because of the toxins in her body from her liver not being able to clear any out. 
Her heart was still pumping. She ended up going into cardiac arrest. We spent about fifteen minutes trying to resuscitate her. But she was dead. And after I saw her, it was like a floodgate had opened. So many children had come in with hepatitis A and liver failure. I’d never seen anything like it. The number of children dying such a slow, painful death was unbelievable.
The other thing that we saw as well was kids coming in with malnutrition. So there were children that came in cachecticly [wastingly] thin—almost skin and bone and struggling to breathe. The electrolytes and salt levels in their bodies were so off from their malnutrition that their hearts were going into an abnormal rhythm, and some of them were having heart attacks and dying.
The UN has said that Israeli forces are obstructing humanitarian operations in Gaza—for example, by preventing their movement and bombing UN schools sheltering refugees, killing aid workers. How do the Israeli forces impact the provision of medical support?
You have to apply through multiple different aid agencies to get in. You have to be accepted by a particular NGO or a particular charity, and then you go through the vetting process. The Israelis require your passport, your birth certificate, your parents’ birth certificates and passports as well, and the names of your grandparents. 
Originally, we were told that we were allowed to bring two bags of medical supplies. About one week before departure, we got told that we had to itemise every single thing that we had in our bags. We weren’t allowed to bring in any medications or drugs. 
When I departed from Australia and arrived in Qatar for a transit flight to Jordan, I got a call from the head of our mission, saying that we weren’t allowed to bring any medical supplies either. I had with me eight bags of medical supplies that I’d managed to get through donations or I had managed to buy.
Our medical team was going to be 23 doctors. It ended up just being seven.
When we were there, there hadn’t been a single medical aid trip that had come in carrying medical equipment for six weeks. The sutures that we used were not suitable for humans. There were no painkillers. There was very little anaesthetic. We had no burns dressing. We had people coming in with 80 percent body burns, and we had no burns dressing, so we were just washing their skin with whatever little equipment that we had.
There was a group of doctors that came in the day after us, and they were turned away because they had a bag of baby milk formula.
Everything was really arbitrary of what you were allowed to do, and it would change almost hourly. And I don’t know whether that was done on purpose to disrupt the planning of the team and how effectively we can get things planned and sorted. The rules would change all the time, even a few hours before departure.
What is something that you think people should know about Gaza that they might not already know? 
It’s hard sometimes to imagine that things are worse when you’re there on the ground than what you see on TV, because what you see on TV is children with heads blown off. You see people buried alive under rubble and people trying to dig them out with their hands. You see children who have starved to death. You see people burning alive in tents. 
When you go there, the reality is even worse. What you see on TV is when the bodies arrive, maybe into the hospital, or you see them when they’re being pulled out from the rubble and the limbs missing and their heads missing. 
But to go to the hospital and see the ones that survived: that’s a different story, because they are in extreme agony. They’re in extreme pain. They are alone. Some of these children are alone. Their whole families have been killed. I’d walk around these wards after I finished my shift, and we would have lollipops with us and things like that to try and give to the kids. But some of the stories and some of the orphaned children there—it’s just so difficult to process. And there’s no real support. The support there is other people in Gaza who are looking after these orphaned children.
What are the people in Gaza saying that you think should be heard by the world?
I think what’s unique about the people in Gaza is how resilient they are. They’ve been through bombing campaigns for the last twenty years, every couple of years, and there’s always hundreds, if not thousands, killed.
So Gaza has been through stuff like this before, and the people are quite resilient. But they’re also human beings as well, and there’s only so much human beings can tolerate. You can’t really generalise everybody in Gaza as resilient and the same. Some people are really struggling.
I was recording when we’d have mass casualty events to post and show what we were dealing with. Sometimes a family member would come up to me and they would say, “What’s the point in recording? We’ve been recording for nine months now, ten months now, and nobody cares”. 
Then there are other people that would say, “Look, I want to show you”. It’d be a mother, she would hold my hand, and she would take me to her child who was dead and had burns and blast injuries. And she would pull back the covers and say: “Video this, show the world this”. 
Some people are still hopeful that the world is going to do something about it, and the world is watching. Others have lost hope.
When I spoke to the doctors and the nurses and certain patients, they were really moved by the amount of support that the world was showing them. They would say the politicians and the governments have always been against us, but now the people are with us. I think that gives them a lot of hope as well. 
We would see graffiti on walls of college campuses [around the world] and things like that, and people were really, really moved by the students.
There’s this air of hope that we’re coming to the end of this occupation. We’re coming to the end of this illegal war and these war crimes. The apartheid state is crumbling in on itself. There’s a lot of people that believe that in Gaza. You can go through the same ward round, and you could be lost with grief and you could be filled with hope and inspired, all at the same time. 
So it’s very varied, but I think the overall message from them is: “Just keep going, it is making a difference”. I think for the first time the people of Gaza don’t feel like they’re alone any more.

Danica Rachel

Eyewitness to genocide

Israel’s latest murderous assault on Lebanon is part of a recurring pattern of imperialist aggression. Israel has invaded Lebanon three times previously—in 1978, 1982 and 2006. On each occasion, Israel inflicted horrific death and misery as well as destroying vital infrastructure and forcing thousands of people from their homes. 
The three previous invasions are, however, only part of the story of Israel’s concerted aggression against the Lebanese people. For well over 50 years, there have been repeated Israeli air raids, sabotage operations, naval attacks, border raids and the funding of the military operations of Lebanese fascist forces. And for many years, Israel maintained an occupation of south Lebanon.
After the defeat of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jordan in 1971, Lebanon became the main centre of the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation. To counter the Palestinian forces, Israel attacked Lebanon more than 6,200 times between 1968 and 1975.
As a consequence of the Israeli aerial attacks, some of the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon were totally levelled. By October 1977, about 300,000 refugees—mainly Lebanese Shia Muslims—had fled southern Lebanon.
These attacks provoked mass popular opposition amongst workers and the poor in Lebanon. After the Israelis assassinated three Palestinian leaders in Beirut in 1973, 250,000 demonstrators, roughly a tenth of the population of Lebanon, marched in protest. The Lebanese army, however, refused to lift a finger to fight Israel and instead tried to crush the resistance.
The ongoing raids into south Lebanon radicalised the predominantly Shiite population of the south and led to the rapid growth of the Lebanese Communist Party, the Organization of Communist Action and other socialist groups. These groups organised armed militias to repel Israeli attacks.
Israel in turn armed and trained fascist militias in Lebanon. The largest militia, the Kataeb or Phalange, had been directly inspired by General Franco’s Spanish fascists of the 1930s.
In March 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon up to the Litani River in an attempt to crush the PLO’s guerrilla forces. The Israel Defence Force unleashed cluster bombs provided by the United States against the civilian population, killing between 1,100 and 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians and forcing 100,000 to 250,000 to flee as refugees.
Israel installed their far-right ally, the South Lebanon Army militia, to preside over Lebanese territory south of the Litani River. During its long years of military rule, the South Lebanon Army, which was cohered, armed and trained by Israel, became notorious for its sheer brutality. In 1985, it set up the Khiam detention centre, where torture was carried out on a large scale against its popular opponents.
In 1982, Israel invaded again. This time, Israeli troops advanced all the way to the Lebanese capital Beirut. They laid siege to the city for nearly two months to starve the population into submission. They then unleashed their fascist Lebanese allies to carry out a horrific massacre of the population of the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
In some areas of southern Lebanon, the Islamist organisation Amal was able to mobilise sections of the Shiite population against the Palestinians and the left, who they blamed for the devastation wreaked by Israel. Amal aped the fascist Phalange with its own massacres of Palestinians. Nonetheless, over the next few years a concerted struggle by left-wing and Arab nationalist forces managed to drive the Israelis out of all but a small strip of southern Lebanon.
By 2006, Hezbollah had established itself as a powerful force in Lebanon, both politically and militarily. So Israel again invaded, determined to take out Hezbollah and thus severely weaken the strategic position of Hezbollah’s ally Iran.
As is invariably the case, Israel was backed by the US, which vetoed a UN ceasefire resolution. Initially, most of the surrounding Sunni Arab states were happy to see Israel take on their regional rival.
But this time the Israeli steamroller was stopped in its tracks as Hezbollah was able to galvanise widespread popular support from outside its core Shia communal base. After 33 days of intense fighting, the Israel Defence Force was forced to retreat with its tail between its legs.
Israel has long held plans for another assault on Hezbollah to make amends for its defeat in 2006. Israel’s public justification this time is that it is simply responding to rocket attacks by Hezbollah, a listed terrorist organisation.
But the Israeli state and, notoriously, its security apparatus Mossad have long been among the most proficient and blatant exponents of terrorism—car bombings, individual assassinations, poisonings and sabotage operations—all around the world. The recent coordinated Israeli attack on pagers and walkie-talkies is just their latest terrorist atrocity.
Yet again Israel’s war drive is backed by the US and other Western powers such as Australia. The US administration doesn’t relish the prospect of a war with Iran, which Israel’s assault on Hezbollah opens up. Nonetheless, the US continues to pour in the weaponry that Israel vitally depends on to carry out its assault on Lebanon and is sending more warships and troops to the Middle East to back Israel. Why?
Because whatever its “excesses”, Israel is a key strategic force defending the interests of US imperialism in the Middle East. With its enormous oil wealth and its strategic location, including the vital international trade route the Suez Canal, the region is of vital importance to world capitalism.
Consequently, the US establishment, including both major political parties, continues to provide the political support and the enormous military hardware necessary for Israel to wage its repeated wars and to carry out its genocide in Gaza.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz summed up the relation of Israel to Western imperialism as early as September 1951: “Israel has been given a role not unlike that of a watchdog ... Should the West prefer for one reason or another to close its eyes it can rely on Israel punishing severely those of the neighbouring states whose lack of manners towards the West has exceeded the proper limits”.
Indeed, most of Israel’s innumerable wars have been waged, not against the Palestinians, but against the neighbouring Arab states. As far back as 1956, Israel made clear its role as a protector of Western imperialist interests by joining the old imperial powers of France and Britain in a war on Egypt. The war was in response to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s new nationalist government led by Gamal Abdel Nasser. 
Since then, Israel has waged war after war against the surrounding Arab states. It was Israel’s lightning military victory in 1967 over Egypt, Syria and Jordan that really demonstrated Israel’s worth to the US as a power in the region.
In the wake of the 1967 war, the US began to throw its full weight behind Israel with much greater political, financial and military support. It became the key defender of Western imperialist interests in a volatile region. Israel’s latest war is no exception to this pattern. 
There has been much hypocritical hand-wringing in the West, including by the Albanese government, over the devastation being inflicted on Lebanon. But the Western leaders’ calls for a ceasefire and “restraint” by Israel are nothing more than a show.
The rich and powerful in the US, Britain and Australia know on which side their bread is buttered. A victory for Israel very much serves their rapacious capitalist interests. We must stridently oppose this war.

Israel’s history of aggression against Lebanon

Israel has declared war on the people of Lebanon. Overnight, it launched 1,600 airstrikes on Lebanese towns and villages, killing approximately 500 people—including at least 35 children. This comes just days after it unleashed indiscriminate terror across the country by exploding thousands of pagers and walkie talkies used by Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and militia allied with Iran. One of the victims was Fatima Abdullah, a nine-year-old girl who had just started the fourth grade.
Clearly, the far-right Israeli government is not satisfied with annihilating the Gaza Strip and expanding the illegal occupation of the West Bank. It demands yet more destruction and devastation, and is prepared to terrorise the entire Lebanese population. 
This act of aggression against Lebanon opens a new and dangerous chapter in Israel’s war on the people of the Levant. It will have huge ramifications for global politics and risks a spiralling regional conflict that could even develop into nuclear war.
Of course, the most immediate impact will be felt by the people of Lebanon. In 2006, the last time Israel waged war on Hezbollah, the death toll for the whole affair was, at most, 3,000 people. It is certain that the casualties this time will be far higher. A year of atrocities in Gaza means that the international media and diplomatic class are even more desensitised to the sight of dead Arab bodies than usual. 
Already, tens of thousands of people are fleeing Lebanon’s south, looking for sanctuary. The school year has been delayed, with many schools transforming into makeshift refugee camps. There are already hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Lebanon—it will be a huge challenge to feed and shelter so many additional people.
Lebanon is entirely unprepared for war and its consequent devastation. In the last decade it has suffered through an unprecedented economic crisis, with a currency and banking collapse leading to the mass impoverishment of its population. In a society with no functioning state institutions, people have been left to fend for themselves. While the wealthy have used these crises to enrich themselves, the working poor of the country’s many sects and ethnicities have suffered like never before. The catastrophe has driven another generation of Lebanon’s youth to flee the country, seeking work and any sort of future. 
Indeed, part of the reason Hezbollah has been fairly restrained in its clashes with Israel—despite numerous provocations—is that many Lebanese people rightly hold it responsible for the terrible social and economic conditions they face and are unwilling to lend it political support. Its leading figures have long been part of the ruling elite that has run the country into the ground, doing sordid deals to ensure that nothing changes. This explains the popularity of the anti-establishment chant in the country’s ill-fated revolution back in 2019: “All of them means all of them, and Nasrallah is one of them” (Hassan Nasrallah is Hezbollah’s leader). It’s impossible to know whether this war will rebuild some of Hezbollah’s reputation or if it will merely exacerbate these preexisting fissures and lead to further social explosions. 
Beyond the suffering and internal dynamics of Lebanon, this war opens whole new vistas of regional bloodshed. Let’s be clear, Israel has been looking to open a new front in its war to its north for months. It has assassinated key figures in Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranian government anywhere and everywhere, hoping to provoke a response that would justify a more serious confrontation. Failing to get the reaction it hoped for, Israel has decided to unilaterally start the war.
But now there is a real risk that Israel gets the regional conflagration they want. That in turn could draw in the Americans, who have made it clear that they are not fundamentally opposed to anything Israel does and will keep providing weapons with no strings attached. 
The obvious question is why the West, including Australia, continues to give Israel the license to kill so freely. Many turn to conspiracy theories or vaguely antisemitic ideas that Israel somehow controls the US. Western institutions don’t offer much in the way of an explanation, spending more time hurling ridiculous accusations of antisemitism at Palestine solidarity activists, as they have no other way of defending their support for Israel’s crimes.
But the real explanation for the US-Israel alliance is that the Americans know they need strong allies in an important region. And nobody could have any doubts about Israel’s murderous capacities.
The sickening reports in the imperialist media following each of Israel’s provocative actions is proof of this. After every Israeli atrocity we are subjected to earnest statements by US and Australian politicians saying that they are “deeply concerned about regional escalation”, as if Israel’s atrocities aren’t already a huge escalation. As if those who respond to Israel’s aggression are the escalators. 
Many have tried to explain away Israel’s lack of restraint as an unfortunate outcome of Netanyahu’s extremist coalition. The liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz
has consistently put forward this line, arguing that the war is irrational and causing irreparable damage to Israel’s international reputation. The liberal wing of the international capitalist press often parrots these arguments after an episode of inexcusable Israeli behaviour, hoping to convince critics of the war that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Israel itself.
But while Israeli society is divided in many ways, it is not divided in unleashing brutality on the workers, students and poor of Palestine and the wider Middle East. When Netanyahu began the latest round of attacks on Lebanon in late August, multiple figures on what passes for the political centre in Israel criticised him for being too restrained. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi are often presented as more moderate and rational figures in the Israeli state. Both have recently criticised Netanyahu for being too mild in response to Hezbollah, with the latter making direct preparations for a ground invasion before it was raised as an option by the government. Benny Gantz, leader of the main opposition coalition, has regularly attacked the government for failing to address the “threat” of Hezbollah.
This means we need to look elsewhere for an explanation of Israel’s atrocious new war on Hezbollah and Lebanon. 
The first is that for all its destruction and killing, Israel will not be able to claim a meaningful victory in Gaza. This is not because Hamas has successfully resisted the brutal occupation of the strip, but because they have managed to simply survive. This will be seen as a failure in Israel. So the government must look elsewhere for a win. It is feasible—though not at all guaranteed—that they could push Hezbollah back a few kilometres north of the Israel/Lebanon border and weaken its military apparatus for the future. This would require a huge amount of violence, but that’s never been an issue for Israel. Scoring some sort of victory and returning Israeli citizens to the abandoned settlements in Israel’s north would be a victory and allow Israel to reestablish its deterrence threat viz its neighbours. 
Second, an attack on Hezbollah is a chance to take a serious enemy down a peg or three. Hezbollah is a well-armed, well-funded and well-established political entity on Israel’s border. It has a loyal following among a large section of the Shi’a community in Lebanon and is central to the function (and disfunction) of Lebanon as a whole. The political and economic cost of extending the current war to a new front is less than the disruption that would be caused by starting a fresh one in a few years. When life gives you lemons, might as well start all the wars you’ve ever dreamt of.
Finally, Netanyahu needs a political victory. He will not destroy Hamas, but achieving the above would be something he could sell to the Israeli public. As well, Netanyahu needs the war to continue for as long as possible to hold together his governing coalition. There’s not much left to destroy in Gaza, so a war on Lebanon allows him to maintain his fragile hold on power by surfing the intense waves of patriotism that a new war with a more serious opponent inevitably entails. This high-risk strategy could backfire, but the people of Lebanon or Gaza will be the biggest losers regardless of whether Netanyahu survives or not.
It is vital that the global movement in solidarity with Palestine responds to Israel’s new act of aggression. Nothing Israel does would be possible without the blank cheque, and endless weaponry, it gets from countries like Australia and the US. That means activists in the West can make a serious contribution to ending Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon by building mass movements that force our governments to cut all ties to Israel.

Israel’s war on Lebanon: ‘a mortal threat to the whole region’

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

How Iran became Western enemy number one

Sun after darkness: The First Intifada

What’s driving Israel’s wars?

‘Welcome to hell’—the barbarity of Israel’s prisons

Israel: a rogue state with many friends

Eyewitness to genocide

Israel’s history of aggression against Lebanon

By attacking Lebanon, Israel seeks to expand its genocidal war

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