the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 22, 2024
We translated the following article from one that appeared in Lutte de Classe, #243, November 2024, published by comrades of the French Trotskyist organization, Lutte Ouvrière.
On September 23, the Israeli army launched a bombing campaign against Lebanon, followed a week later by a ground invasion of the south of the country. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu thus opened a new front, while pursuing the war in Gaza without respite.
The territory of Gaza, a small enclave covering an area of 140 square miles, populated by almost 2.5 million inhabitants, has been bombarded relentlessly. According to U.N. statistics, over 60% of buildings have been partially or totally destroyed. But media reports, produced despite the Israeli authorities’ refusal to let journalists into Gaza, give the impression that everything has been devastated and that only ruins remain.
The death toll of more than 42,000, established by the Gazan Ministry of Health, must be much lower than the reality. Tens of thousands of people still under the ruins are not counted. Added to this are all the Palestinians who died for lack of treatment in hospitals no longer able to provide care. Forced to live without water or electricity, under plastic sheeting or in canvas camps, Palestinians are threatened with starvation and disease.
A year ago, Netanyahu proclaimed that the objectives, the aims of the war, were to free the hostages and “eradicate Hamas.” Neither of these war aims has been achieved.
The death of Hamas leader Yahya al-Sinwar on October 17 does not mean the end of the organization. Netanyahu may well boast that virtually all Hamas battalions have been destroyed, but ongoing military operations show that this is not the case. Since the beginning of October, for example, the Israeli army has surrounded the Palestinian camp of Jabalia, in the north of the Gaza Strip, claiming that Hamas has reconstituted its military capabilities there, and has ordered all Gazans present to evacuate “immediately” to the south.
Published at the beginning of August, an investigation by CNN journalists and American military analysts estimated that of Hamas’ 24 battalions, only three had been completely destroyed, the others remaining capable of carrying out guerrilla actions. Far from having been destroyed, Hamas seems even to have managed, according to numerous testimonies, to maintain a semblance of a state apparatus in northern Gaza, capable of controlling the distribution of much of the humanitarian aid, despite months of fighting and bombardments.
As for the 218 hostages taken to Gaza on October 7, almost all of those released were freed when a truce was negotiated with Hamas in November 2023 to exchange 117 hostages for 240 Palestinian prisoners. At the time, Israel’s far right denounced the agreement as a betrayal and threatened to withdraw its support for the government, which would have led to its downfall. Since then, in order to stay in power, Netanyahu has adopted the rhetoric of the extreme right and refused to conclude a new truce, adding a new condition each time the negotiations, conducted under American pressure, seemed close to success.
This attitude has led to the development of a protest movement, organized by the families of the hostages, who denounce the way in which, in their view, “Netanyahu has abandoned the hostages” by pursuing a policy of unbridled war, refusing to talk to Hamas.
Dissension also emerged at the top of the state, within the government itself and in the military’s high command. The army spokesperson essentially declared that destroying Hamas was impossible, and therefore could not be an aim of war. While the government’s two far-right ministers are in favor of annexing Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has declared himself totally opposed to such a prospect, as have most of the army’s leaders. They remember perfectly well the human and material cost of the occupation of Gaza until 2005, and they have no desire to find themselves in that situation again.
Israeli leaders may disagree today on how to end the war in Gaza, but they all agreed to launch it, and on how to carry it out—indulging in a massacre to terrorize the Palestinians. On October 8, 2023, Defense Minister Gallant, who today appears to oppose Netanyahu, declared that a total blockade of Gaza had to be imposed, and that the inhabitants of Gaza were “animals to be treated as such.”
In reality, “eradicating” Hamas is not the real objective of Israel’s leaders. It would be entirely possible for them to work with Hamas, once again entrusting it with management of the territory. Hamas would then once again become the de facto policeman in Gaza, ready to repress its population if need be, collaborating with the Israeli state. This is exactly what the Islamist organization did for 16 years, after seizing power in Gaza in 2007. As for Israel’s leaders, they have long carried out such a hybrid policy. In 1993, after refusing for decades to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization, denouncing it as a terrorist organization, they signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO, establishing the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas, for its part, would be perfectly willing to accept such an agreement. By launching the attacks of October 7, it sought to establish itself as the necessary intermediary between the Palestinians and Israel’s leaders and, beyond them, with the major imperialist powers—without the slightest concern for the price that the Palestinian population would have to pay. Indeed, it was foreseeable that the massacres committed on October 7 would lead in turn to an outburst of Israeli violence against the inhabitants of Gaza.
Such a solution is totally out of the question today, as Netanyahu is engaged in a policy of warlike one-upmanship in order to restore unity behind him.
To make people forget that the aims of the war in Gaza had not been achieved, he added a new one: the return of the 60,000 Israelis living in a three mile wide strip along the Lebanese border, who had been displaced at the start of the war in Gaza by Hezbollah’s rocket fire. Hezbollah had thus sought to consolidate its image as a fighting party against Israel. As with Hamas, the fact that its policies pushed almost the big majority of the Israeli population back onto Netanyahu’s side did not factor in Hezbollah’s calculations.
The Israeli army is waging war in Lebanon with the same methods and the same cynicism as in Gaza. Netanyahu threatened the Lebanese with the same fate as the Gazans if they did not get rid of Hezbollah. To kill its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and reach his bunker seven yards underground, the Israeli army used bombs that blew up several buildings in the vicinity, killing hundreds. The center of Beirut, the Plain of Bekaa in the east of the country and Christian villages in the north were also bombed. All the Lebanese became potential targets. Over a million of the country’s 5.5 million inhabitants have already taken to the road to flee the war, seeking refuge in the north of the country or even in Syria.
In response to the invasion of Lebanon and the assassination of Nasrallah, the Iranian government fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel, almost double the number fired in April. Israeli leaders have declared that they will retaliate against Iran. We are therefore well on the way to an escalation that is impossible to predict. The spread of the war to the whole of the Middle East is not only a threat, it has already begun, as the Israeli army has not only bombed Gaza and Lebanon, but also Syria, Yemen and Iraq on several occasions.
Netanyahu embarked on this escalation to safeguard his power and under pressure from the far right. But far from constituting a break with the past, his policy is in line with that of all his predecessors since 1948. The policy of Israel’s founders, in line with Zionist ideology, was to create an exclusively Jewish state, using violence against the Palestinian population to terrorize and drive them out, imposing war on neighboring Arab states. As early as 1948, over 700,000 Palestinians were stripped of their property and land, and forced into exile in neighboring countries, pushed into refugee camps where their descendants still live today. Such a policy has not only devastated the Palestinians, it has locked the Israeli population inside a besieged fortress, condemning them to live armed, regularly with rifle in hand.
The need to defend Israel’s security has always been used by its governments to justify their warlike adventures, their military interventions and their siding with the United States against the neighboring peoples of the Middle East. They have been all the more able to use this argument because the policy of the leaders of the Arab states and Palestinian organizations—both the secular, socialist PLO and the reactionary Islamist Hamas—has been to wage their struggle on the military terrain, targeting the entire Israeli population, which they have thus helped to drive back into the arms of its leaders.
The peoples of the region have thus found themselves trapped in a bloody impasse. Responsibility for this lies with their leaders, starting with those of the State of Israel, who have always denied the Palestinians’ right to have a national existence. But the primary responsibility lies with imperialism, which has deliberately set Jewish and Arab peoples against each other in order to establish and maintain its domination. The British and French colonial powers were the first to do this, when they were vying for control of the region. The United States took over after the Second World War.
For several decades, the United States has given unwavering support to Israel, since this had provided it with a reliable ally. Capable of mobilizing its population for war—who have become convinced that they are thus defending their own security—Israel has proven itself able to wage war, playing the role of gendarme for the imperialist order in the Middle East.
Israeli leaders have never been mere puppets of the United States. More than once, they took a degree of independence from their American protector, presenting it with a fait accompli. But imperialism has been ready to have a restless ally who doesn’t obey them in every respect, because imperialism benefits from it. When Netanyahu wages war against Iran, he is serving the interests of U.S. imperialism, which is also seeking to weaken or even overthrow the Tehran regime.
How far are Washington’s leaders prepared to support their Israeli ally in the current escalation? With only a few weeks to go before a presidential election with an uncertain outcome, the U.S. administration has been in no position to decide much of anything. This uncertainty gives Netanyahu additional room for maneuver.
But the next tenant of the White House, whether Republican Trump or Democrat Harris, may well decide to commit the U.S. to a conflict against Iran. In the recent past, under U.S. leaders, Republican or Democrat, the U.S. has shown itself ready to plunge the Middle East into chaos by waging war against Iraq and Syria.
As revolutionary communists, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, the Lebanese and all peoples who are victims of the violence of imperialism and of the Israeli state that serves as imperialism’s armed wing in the Middle East. We want the military defeat of the Israeli state in the war it is waging, but we also insist that there can be no peace until all the peoples of the region, including the Jews and Arabs currently living within the borders of historic Palestine, have equal rights.
Our solidarity with the Palestinian people is not a political support for Hamas or Hezbollah, two nationalist bourgeois organizations whose sole aim is to establish their own state apparatus within the framework of the imperialist system, so that they too can reap a share of the exploitation of their people. Even if imperialism eventually accepts the creation of a small Palestinian state, which would remain under its close surveillance and that of Israel, this would not put an end to the oppression of peoples, and would bring neither freedom nor prosperity to the exploited strata and to the workers, victims of a double oppression, both national and social.
Revolutionary proletarian militants must oppose the policies of nationalist organizations, by putting forward a perspective of common struggle by the workers of all the countries in the region to put an end to imperialist domination, and to build a socialist federation of the peoples of the Middle East.