"Christian Rakovsky": kannanotto Lähi-idästä

- No more Qana massacres!

- Stop the Israeli-U.S. imperialist war against Lebanon and Gaza!

- Victory to the Lebanese and Palestinian Resistance!

- No international imperialist force of occupation in the South Lebanon!

- All imperialist troops out from Lebanon and the Middle East!

The Balkan Socialist Centre 'Christian Rakovsky" denounces the barbaric onslaught launched by the Israeli war machine, with the full backing of U.S. and British imperialism and the complicity of the European Union and the United Nations, against the people of Lebanon.

Since June 27 in Gaza and since July 12 in Lebanon, the Zionist regime's armed forces have been systematically destroying the infrastructure and slaughtering innumerable civilians, in a careful planned campaign of deliberate state terrorism against the Palestinian and Lebanese populations. The supreme protector and guide of the Olmert-Peretz Zionist government, Condoleezza Rice, did not hide the aims of the new war campaign: the establishment of a "New Middle East" adapted to the needs of U.S. imperialism in the current period of structural crisis of the decayed global capitalist system. To achieve their goals, the imperialists and their Zionist watchdogs in the region do not shrink from perpetrating one atrocity after another. Qana today, as Sabra and Shatila in 1982 or My Lai in Vietnam on March 16, 1968, are the unforgettable and unforgivable monuments of barbarism built by capitalism in its historical decline, which threaten the present and the future of all humanity.

The U.S. and British imperialism open admit their role in this butchery. Washington and London encourage Tel Aviv and arm the IDF with the most sophisticated "smart bombs" and high-tech weaponry to massacre children, elderly and women in Gaza, in the villages of the South Lebanon, in the poor neighborhoods of south Beirut; the United States and Britain, but also Germany and the EU, continue not only to cover up for the Zionist state's crimes but also to maneuver in order to prevent even a cease fire before Israel achieves its declared immediate war aims: the destruction of Hezbollah and the establishment of an occupied zone in the Lebanese South.

The ludicrous, hypocritical resolution of the 25 E.U. ministers of foreign affairs in the aftermath of the Qana massacre is an insult for the innocent victims; it shows that European imperialism is not just a bystander but an accomplice of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel. The presence of an EU or a more extended multinational military force would be an act of collaboration with the IDF serial killers, a factor of war, not of peace. Member countries of the EU, like Greece, or its competitor, the candidate EU member Turkey, compete over who will be part of or even head of the imperialist military force in South Lebanon. Olmert already had welcome the "offer" by Turkish PM Erdogan, proving again that the Ankara-Tel Aviv axis still works perfectly, despite the hypocritical stance of the AKP in government regarding Israel's excesses. The Turkish state is not only one of the staunchest allies of Israel, but is also more and more taking it as a role model. As soon as Israel started its offensive on Lebanon, Turkey started to press the US and its Kurdish allies in Iraq, Barzani and Talabani, to let its hands free so that it could wage the same kind of war on the Kurdish guerrilla movement PKK. While almost the entire population of Turkey is filled with horror and hatred in the face of the Zionist atrocities in Lebanon and Palestine, the Turkish bourgeoisie turns to the US and asks the abominable question, "Why can Israel do it and not us?" Although Turkey has not been given the green light this time around, it will not be long before the Kurdish people and the whole world will see with their own eyes that the Barzanis and Talabanis will give in to US pressure and aid Turkey in repressing the Kurdish "serhildan" (intifada in Kurdish) in Turkey.

Meantime, it cannot be overlooked that the U.S. bases in the region, particularly in Souda, Greece, and the British base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, are playing now, as in all previous Middle East wars, a crucial role for the overall imperialist war campaign. We call the popular movements in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus to mobilize actively against imperialism and its war, to kick out their military and intelligence presence.

- U.S.-British-NATO military bases out of Greece, Turkey and Cyprus!

- No Greek or Turkish troops in Lebanon!

The war in Lebanon could potentially expand over all of the Middle East, engulfing the entire region in its flames. The Bush administration openly states that it is now its frontline in its global "war against terror." The attacks on Beirut have as targets Damascus and above all Teheran. Since the U.S.-French imposed departure of the Syrian troops from Lebanon, following Hariri's assassination and the anti-Syrian mobilizations, imperialism attempts to lead the Assad regime into a capitulation of the kind already imposed to Gaddafi's regime in Libya. Furthermore, by presenting and attacking Hezbollah as "Iran's military arm in the borders of Israel," U.S. imperialism builds up the pressure on Teheran to help the Bush administration manage the Iraqi disaster and escape the quagmire there, while keeping imperialist control on a country fragmented and pushed to sectarian civil war by the occupation forces themselves.

We say unequivocally:

- Hands off Syria! Hands off Iran!

Imperialism needs urgently to destroy every focus of anti-imperialist struggle and opposition in this vital region, above all in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. But the result so far, rather than a politically re-shaped "new Middle East" under imperialist control, is a completely destabilized and uncontrolled region in volcanic explosion. Like Iraq for the American imperialists, Lebanon becomes a deadly trap for the Zionists, marking, as many mainstream analysts admit, a strategic defeat for this bastion of imperialism.

Hezbollah has proved in battle that is not a "terrorist group in the payroll of Iran" but a genuine national liberation movement expressing and directing the national resistance of the entire Lebanese people, beyond sectarian divisions, against the aggressors. Hezbollah already inflicted important political defeats on Zionism: it proved that the IDF is not an "irresistible," "undefeatable" war machine but, as the Israeli heartland itself, quite vulnerable to the blows of a real people's liberation war.

The Zionist state from its beginnings was always in a permanent state of war emergency. By this fact alone it is clear that it never was or will be a genuine "solution" for the Jewish people against anti-Semitism; on the contrary, with its crimes spreads anti-Semitism all over the world. In today's conditions of crisis, war became Zionism's main means of control over both of the Palestinian Arab people under occupation and the impoverished Israeli Jewish population. This technology of power is now backfiring against its users, the Zionist state and its imperialist backers. War cannot anymore establish imperialist control over the Arab populations of the region, rather it radicalizes them. The initial "national unity" promoted by the war and the state among the Jewish population could disintegrate with the prolongation of the war and its effects in an internal situation marked by a protracted economic, social and moral crisis. The Lebanon war culminates the dual war waged during the last years by the Zionist governments of Sharon and now of Olmert-Peretz against the Palestinians as well as against the Jewish population, that sees its living standards and social safety net systematically destroyed by the elite in power in the name of "security." The development of the anti-war movement, as the demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa show, is more rapid than in the previous 1982 Lebanon war. The task of all the vanguard fighters is to unite against the imperialist war and the system that generates it: the masses of the oppressed Palestinian people together with the Jewish workers and poor.

The Balkan Socialist Centre 'Christian Rakovsky" calls on all the fighters in the region and internationally to mobilize in defense of the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples; their struggle is our struggle! Against the permanent war of imperialism, forward for the permanent revolution to overthrow it!

- Hands off Lebanon and Gaza!

- Zionist-imperialist troops out!

- End the Occupation in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq!

- Free all political prisoners from the Zionist jails!

- For the right of return of all Palestinian refugees in their homeland!

- Down with Zionism!

- For one secular socialist Republic in the entire historical territory of Palestine!

- For a Socialist Federation of the peoples of the Middle East!

The Executive Secretariat of the Balkan Socialist Centre "Christian Rakovsky"

3 August 2006