Lebanon, Zionism's Vietnam

Notes for an analysis by Savas Michael-Matsas

1. A strategic impasse

The second Lebanon war launched by Zionist Israel on July 12, 2006 with the full backing of U.S. and British imperialism and the complicity of the European Union, the United Nations and the reactionary Arab regimes could proved to be Zionism's Vietnam.

"2006 is not 1982" rightly says a statement by the Lebanese Hezbollah. The 1982 IDF invasion and siege of Beirut that led to 30.000 Lebanese civilian victims and culminated in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees ended with the eviction of the PLO and an 18 years- long Zionist occupation of South Lebanon. The 2006 second Lebanon war has reached already a strategic impasse, as it has been noted by liberal analysts (see Israel's strategic impasse by Paul Rogers, August 1, 2006).

The central Israeli military doctrine to have the initiative to launch a Blitzkrieg (as in the previous wars of 1948, 1956, 1967) or to regain rapidly the initiative (the 1973 Yom Kippur war) is seriously damaged. For a period of time longer than ever before, an Arab Shiite popular militia of a few thousands fighters could successfully resist the most savage attack by one of the biggest war machines in the world, an Army, Air Force and Navy equipped by the most sophisticated high tech weaponry provided without any restrictions by the biggest imperialist power in the world, the United States. Hezbollah succeeded where all the standing Arab armies in the past had failed. The Kosovo type air war, attempted first, despite the destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure, the thousands innocent victims and the one million refugees that it created, failed to destroy, or even to decrease substantially the military capabilities of the Hezbollah rocket-launch sites. The ground offensive has to move extremely slowly as places such as Bent Jbail became a new Stalingrad very costly in lives for the invaders. To achieve the officially claimed war aim- the annihilation of Hezbollah's military potential- means an advance of the IDF forces up to the Bekaa valley and a protracted occupation of Lebanon, even in the north of the Litani River. The immediate threat perceived by the Zionists themselves is that their troops become stalked in a stalemate facing a permanent war of attrition by an insurgency vastly based in a popular environment deeply hostile to the Occupation forces. In other words Lebanon could be for Israel what Iraq became for the U.S. Occupation forces: a quagmire and a strategic failure, a new Vietnam.

Israel's strategic impasse is described by the editorial of the British Economist on August 5, 2005 in the following terms "In chess they call it a Zugzwang, the position that arises when your next move, any next move, is liable to lead to disaster. That is roughly where Ehud Olmert finds himself this week. If Israel's prime minister ceases fire now, Hezbollah will claim that it has won simply because, after three weeks of pounding by the regional superpower, its men were still putting up a fight and firing their rockets into Israel's towns and villages. But if Mr. Olmert chooses instead to push deeper into Lebanon, he risks sinking Israel in a costly guerrilla war like the one it thought it had ended by leaving Lebanon six years ago."

U.S. and U.N. diplomacy, the entire charade about a "cease-fire' that always is postponed as the imperialists still hope to win time for the IDF to win its unattainable military aims, and above all the preparations for a multinational NATO or E.U. or UN force to police South Lebanon on behalf of Israel manifest both the full complicity of the American and European imperialists with Zionism as well as the difficulty to impose their plans upon the resisting Lebanese masses. A multinational imperialist force in the area will be an instrument for war and not for peace and it has to be resolutely opposed by all the oppressed in the region and internationally. The fact that the Olmert - Peretz government is now in favor to the deployment of such a force is an obvious sign of its function as well as a symptom revealing the strategic weakness of the Zionist State in crisis.

The myth of the invincibility and irresistibility of the Israeli Armed Forces, its military power of "persuasion" imposed to the neighbor Arab countries and its legitimacy as "security" provider to the Israeli Jewish population has received a devastating blow. The proven vulnerability of the IDF as well as of the Israeli heartland itself, target of non stop rocket attacks, will have huge political implications both in the Arab and the entire Middle East as in Israel itself.

2. The Hezbollah factor

"2006 is not 1982". Israeli strategy totally disregarded the deep changes that occurred the last decades in Lebanese society and the embedment of Hezbollah in it. In 1982, the Zionists were able, to a certain extent, to manipulate the sectarian fracture and strife of Lebanese society, the post 1975 civil war devastations and the tensions between the PLO presence and the local social/political forces; the PLO was presented as the source of all internal and external troubles suffered by Lebanon; thus the IDF was initially welcomed by a section at least of the Shias while the Christian Maronite militias played the role of mercenaries and butchers for the Zionist State against the Palestinians. In 2006 the strategy was also to provoke by a brutal attack on Lebanon the violent reaction of the local population and political establishment against the Hezbollah, presented as responsible for Israel's harsh attack as well as an instrument of Syria. The U.S. -French imperialist sponsored 2005 "cedar revolution" by manipulating the anti-Syrian sentiment after decades of Syrian military-financial presence succeeded to achieve the eviction of the Syrian troops. Now it becomes clear that the events following Hariri's assassination were an integral part of the preparations for the current invasion of the country.

But this miscalculated strategy backfired against its architects. Lebanon, which, with enormous difficulties, had just re-emerged from the ruins of the 1975-92 period sees itself to be buried again under ruins by Israel. During the last 15 years of economic recovery the sectarian divide was fading. Hezbollah itself is an integral part of this social process.

Born out of the Zionist occupation in 1982, with a firm base on poor popular strata radicalized by the Iranian revolution, Hezbollah succeeded to give a crushing blow to the U.S. Marines in 1983, to evict U.S. and French troops form the country and above all to oblige, by a continuous guerilla warfare, the Zionist Occupation Army in the South to leave shamefully Lebanon in May 2000.

During the period of reconstruction of Lebanon, Hezbollah acquired a strong position in the economy and the Lebanese political parliamentary system. There are now many Hezbollah businessmen and parliamentarians while the Shia "Party of God" strengthened its ties with its constituency by building an extensive social safety net for the poorest masses.

As the Zionists themselves now discover, their actions not only do not isolated or destroyed Hezbollah but made it the point of national unification of all Lebanese beyond sectarian religious or ethnic divisions against the Israeli-U.S. war campaign. Furthermore, as everybody acknowledges, the leader of Hezbollah Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah has become the most popular leader in the entire Arab and Muslim world, particularly among the impoverished and oppressed popular masses from the times of Nasser. The contrast with the despicable, servile pro-imperialist position taken by the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers is devastating for them and galvanizes the Arab peoples. Nasrallah's and Hezbollah's defiance and indomitable resistance to Zionism have become an independent, powerful, political factor of mass radicalization. It has proven in battle that a people's liberation war wins where all the standing armies of the reactionary bourgeois and semi-feudal regimes of the region failed. It is not a surprise that those regimes are now frightened by the anger of their own people. The 2006 war opens a new chapter in the revolutionary upsurge in the Middle East.

Hezbollah is not al-Qaeda. It has nothing to do with "a fundamentalist terrorist organization in the payroll of the Rogue States of Iran and/or Syria" as it is presented by the U.S.-Israeli propaganda. While definitely, the Iranian revolution is Hezbollah's point of reference and Iran supports it, nevertheless it's far from being its "instrument" or an "Iranian outpost" or "Iran's vanguard" in the area (as the despicable Amir Peretz claimed for obvious reasons). By balancing between secular Baathist Damascus and clericalist-Islamist Teheran, Hezbollah won a space of maneuver that cleverly uses it for its own independent benefit.

"Fundamentalism" itself is a dubious Western political construct, particularly in the post 9/11 period (See Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Verso 2002). The different and sometimes opposed currents of political Islam have various social political origins but generally they are occupying now the vacuum left by the dual bankruptcy of the Stalinist CPs and of secular bourgeois nationalism in the region. It is a form of their decomposition as forms of political organization of the anti-imperialist struggle; a revolt against their corruption, against their blatant inability to confront imperialism as well as against their constant collaboration with it; at the same time it is a form of control over the anti-imperialist struggle by local elites and imperialism itself (as the historical experience shows from the founding of the "Muslim Brotherhood" in the '30s backed by the British colonialists to the "Irangate" and the U.S. sponsored Talibans in Afghanistan, including Bin Laden himself). It is a religious negation of secular nationalism and at the same time a religious form of bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalism as they decay in the imperialist epoch. The call for a return to Islam's values (or rather of a peculiar interpretation of them) can have a profound appeal to the deprived Muslim masses that hate the Western Great Powers and the corrupted privileged local elites; at the same time it can control their struggle and subjugate them to bourgeois forces and interests. The evolution of Iran after 1979 is a warning to those in the Left who easily forget the bitter lessons of the past and are ready today to surrender to Islamist obscurantism (like the British SWP and its co-thinkers in the IS Tendency).

Every revolutionary organization and fighter in the world has the duty to unequivocally support the resistance waged today by Hezbollah forces against the Zionists invaders (as well as to oppose the Zionist attempt to overthrow the Hamas government, the real reason behind the murderous attacks against Gaza that ignited the current new war in Lebanon). But at the same time the political independence of the working class and of its revolutionary Party can never be sacrificed on the altar of impressionist accommodation to bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalist forces, religious or secular. The vacuum left by the collapse of Stalinism and secular nationalism has to be filled by Marxism and an international perspective, program and organization that can defeat imperialism and end national oppression.

The rise of Islamist radicalism is a moment of transition either to the dead alley of nationalism and finally to capitulation to imperialism or to the road of social revolution and Socialism.

3. The "new Middle East"

The current war confrontation in Lebanon is not a local disturbance but a world historical event with world wide implications. The Bush Administration itself officially considers the present war as the frontline of its imperialist "global war on terror" and accordingly Condoleezza Rice has spoken about the "birth pangs of the new Middle East". The U.S. assisted 2006 Zionist invasion in Lebanon is a leap in the continuity of the post 9/11 U.S. international war drive, following the 2001 aggression on Afghanistan and above all the 2003 war and occupation of Iraq.

The aims of this permanent imperialist war campaign are not solely the control of the biggest oil reserves on the planet but to re-shape the political map of the entire Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia, in the borders of former Soviet Union and China, and to re-organize accordingly the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism in the new conditions of post Cold War chaos and of capitalist Globalization in crisis.

So far, the permanent war offensive produced mass slaughter of civilians, massacres such as in Haditha in Iraq, unprecedented destruction of cities and villages, regression to barbarism, the new Auschwitz of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib - but also a popular insurgency and resistance that plunged the Occupation forces in a quagmire from where they cannot escape nor stay. Iraq has raised again the specter of a new Vietnam for the US invaders and provoked political regime crises both in Europe (Spain, Italy, and Britain) and in North America (the "CIAgate" etc.). The U.S. led imperialist war in Iraq had, among other things, the paradoxical result to help Iran to rise more powerful than ever before with claims for regional hegemony. Imperialism itself became the biggest factor of political destabilization.

The new wave of battles in Afghanistan, the continuing resistances in Iraq, Palestine and now Lebanon have created a war theater from the Mediterranean to Central Asia.

The new American-Israeli war against Lebanon was planned to destroy Hezbollah, to impose a Quisling regime in Beirut, to reshape the Assad regime in Damascus along the lines of the "new" Gaddafi regime in Tripoli, and to put pressure on Iran, not only on its nuclear program but above all to drastically help the US to control the situation in Iraq using their important influence on the Iraqi Shia majority in the country.

The anti-Iranian emphasis in the Israeli-US war propaganda is not an accident; it flows out of the strategic needs of the campaign. In this case too, the imperialist and Zionists lie. The Israel-Hezbollah confrontation is not just a proxy war between America and Iran because neither Hezbollah is a mercenary armed group of Iran nor the American-Israeli "strategic alliance" dissolves all the peculiarities and contradictions of Zionism itself, above all the centrality that the Palestinian question has for its future.

As a matter of fact, the last 5 years, U.S. imperialism and its faithful collaborators in war crimes succeeded to unite in an interconnected chain a series of the most complex and specific problems: the Palestinian problem, the rise of radical Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, the insurgency in occupied Iraq, Iran, Syria, the chaotic, uncontrollable situation in Afghanistan. The Zionist offensive in Gaza in an attempt to overthrow the Hamas government and impose Zionism's "final solution to the Palestinian problem" led to the direct confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon; the heroic resistance of the Lebanese Shiite militia radicalized and mobilized the masses in the Arab and Muslim world, including hundreds of thousands of Shia demonstrators in Sadr City in Baghdad, adding more complexity to the problems of an Occupation already in impasse; Iran emerges more powerful and Afghanistan totally out of control.

In an editorial on July 26, 2006, the Financial Times, the mouthpiece of the British ruling class, made the following sharp comment on the rhetoric of Condoleezza Rice on the "birth pangs of the new Middle East": "Washington may be confusing 'birth pangs' with death-rattle"!

This description is accurate: the current confrontation in Lebanon marks the death-rattle of the U.S. imperialist "new Middle East" scheme with immeasurable consequences in America, in Europe, in a world situation already shaken by an insoluble world capitalist crisis.

Even leading "realist" strategists of imperialism such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have warned about the catastrophic results of the "neoconservative" policies of the Bush Administration in the Middle East. In a recent interview to Nathan Gardels (published by Global Services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune, August 3, 2006), Brzezinski stressed that "if neo-con policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well".

4. The crisis of Zionism

An analysis of the current events should not overlook the crucial fact, carefully hidden by apologists and nationalists that Israel's second Lebanese war is an expression of Zionism's crisis and a mighty factor for its exacerbation.

State terrorism culminating into war is a means and method of control. The Zionist State used always war to impose its control in the usurped Palestinian lands and on the Arab populations at large. But also it used and uses war as method of social control of the Israeli Jewish population itself.

Moshe Sharet, Histadrout leader and editor of its daily, Israel's first Foreign Minister and prime Minister in 1953-55 wrote that in the mind of Ben Gurion and the Army officers "The question of peace does not exist [.] [Retaliatory operations] are the elixir of life [.] they help us keep the civil and military tension. Without them, we wouldn't have a fighting nation, and without a fighting regime we are lost. [.] Give us a war with the Arab countries and all our troubles are over..." (M. Sharet, Personal Diaries, Tel Aviv-Maariv 1978:Vol. III, pp 1021-1022).

The Declaration of Independence in 1948 was coupled by the declaration of a State of Emergency which remains in order until now. Nowhere as in Israel is it proved so accurate Walter Benjamin's thesis that in our imperialist epoch of Capitalist decline the state of emergency becomes the rule rather than an exception. The permanent state of war emergency in the Zionist State was vital from the beginning not only to fulfill the task of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab population, the Nakba, but also to integrate the Jewish immigrants in a settler State of a peculiar kind.

Zionism has promised to the Jews a "national home", which will provide them with security against anti-Semitism. Then it used cynically a non stop "security risk" to impose ideological control in a militarized ghetto, while at the same time, by its crimes and arrogance, it became the strongest source spreading anti-Semitism not only in the Arab world but internationally. Then, using anti-Semitism's crimes, past and present, it strengthens the main anti-Semite lie that identifies Judaism and Jews as a whole with Zionism and imperialist domination. The "Jewish" State was very successful to systematically demolish the best Jewish traditions; it reduced the historic-cultural tradition of the Jewish people from a universalist Tradition of the Oppressed into an ethnic culture of barbaric national oppression.

The Zionist State is an organized machine of force, of direct and indirect violence: directly, it is an apparatus for the expropriation of the Palestinian people from all its national rights, the right of national self determination and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes; indirectly, it is a machine for social control of the Jewish population, particularly the workers and urban poor, in the name of "security".

Security by itself is not enough: the material reproduction of life needs not only military but also social economic means. Zionism, historically, had promised a "national home" where the Jews could live in security, prosperity and equality. Now, nearly 60 years after the foundation of the State of Israel, this place is the less "secure" for Jews than anything else in the world, the one third of the Israeli Jewish population lives under the line of poverty and social inequality in Israeli society exceeds even inequality in the United States. "During the early 1950s, 'socialist' Israel was still one of the more egalitarian countries, with the top 20 per cent of the population earning only 3.3 times the income of the bottom 20 per cent. This was certainly impressive, particularly relative to 'free market countries' such as the United States, where the comparable ratio was as high as 9.5. By 1995, however after two generations of 'Americanisation', the situation was reversed. Israel was now the most unequal of all industrialized countries, with the ratio of the top to bottom 20 per cent reaching 21.3 compared with 'only' 10.6 in the United States"( See Jonathan Nitzan- Shimshon Bichler The Global Political Economy of Israel , Pluto Press 2002 p.351).

In the '50s and '60s, the Zionist state could sustain its "permanent state of war emergency" thanks to a strong welfare State for Jewish immigrants, which was made possible not only by the massive American aid and German reparations but above all by the international environment of the post World War II protracted boom based on the Bretton Woods Keynesian settlement. Military Keynesianism in Israel was interconnected with the tensions of the Cold War and the permanent state of war emergency was crucial for the Zionist State to function as a bastion of Western imperialist interests in the region, securing the free flow of cheap oil, vital for the post war capitalist expansion and for the implementation of Keynesian policies in the West.

The collapse of the Bretton Woods international edifice at the end of the '60s- early '70s (the 1967 and the 1973 Israeli-Arab wars were moments and factors to this collapse) and the transformation of the "Thirty Glorious Years" of post war capitalist expansion into a unprecedented world crisis of overproduction of capital have disintegrated the Keynesian basis that sustained the Zionist project. The 1977 electoral victory of Likud marked the end not solely of traditional Labor Zionist rule but also of Zionist State welfare policies. The impact of the crisis led to a huge public debt and a Tel Aviv stock market crash. The Labor-Likud coalition Peres- Shamir government of 1985 launched a protracted "neoliberal" social war of attrition against the living standards and the social safety net of the Israeli Jewish population that escalated, later, under Netanyahu and Sharon.

Meantime, between the two Lebanese wars in 1982 and 2006, continuing Zionist aggression and oppression against the Palestinian (and Lebanese) peoples had as result the emergence of mass popular movements of resistance, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and above all the two Intifadas of 1987-93 and 2000. The first Intifada, a genuine mass popular movement of direct action led by self-organized popular committees could not be stopped but by a great scale maneuver- the so-called "Oslo Peace process" and the establishment of the powerless "Palestinian Authority" in the 1967 Occupied Territories.

The deterioration of conditions of life for Palestinians in the Territories under the Oslo process( the biggest numbers of Zionist settlements were planted then), the corruption of the PA itself and the ambiguous prospect of the creation of a Zionist economically and militarily controlled demilitarized Bantustan for Palestinians pretending to be their "independent "Statelet" have produced - following the well known provocation by Ariel Sharon- an explosion in 2000, the Al Aqsa Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo process.

Sharon's rise to power was tied with a "dual war against the Palestinians and against all but the wealthiest Israelis" as Yoav Peled has rightly pointed out (Y. Peled, Dual War: the Legacy of Ariel Sharon, Critique Vol. 34, No 2, August 2006 pp. 197-203). The Second Intifada was different from the first one. The corruption of the PA and the disintegration of PLO secular nationalism put limits to popular mass direct action, strengthened the ranks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and gave a predominantly "militarized" aspect to the struggle favoring "kamikaze" attacks, often against civilian targets. Sharon exploited this fact to promise "security" and to divert against the Palestinians the mounting social anger of the impoverished Jewish population, with the help, as well, of the rudimentary social safety net provided to the urban poor by the fanatic religious formations such as Shas.

As matter of fact, despite the "dual war" against he Palestinian masses and the Jewish workers, Zionists found more and more difficult to keep control of both of them. Sharon's last attempt was to stabilize the situation by a unilaterally imposed "definite borders" of Israel by a fake "disengagement" transforming Gaza into an open air prison of one million and half destitute people, mainly unemployed, dismantling a few settlements in the West Bank but keeping a Draconian control, raising an apartheid Wall of Shame between the oppressors and the oppressed. The attempt accelerated the crisis of the Zionist political system, splitting both its traditional wings, Likud and Labor and producing a weak hybrid formation, Kadima, and an even weaker Olmert-Peretz government. The new Zionist war against Gaza and Lebanon is a continuation of Sharon's insane "strategy" and the manifestation of its crisis. It is an effort to re-establish Zionist control both over the Palestinians and the Arabs at large as well as in the Israeli Jewish "home front" in the name of "national unity".

But war has manifested and exacerbates all the weakness of the government and the crisis of the entire Zionist political-military establishment. The public feuds between Olmert and his Defense Minister Peretz, between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister Livni, between the government and the IDF, within the IDF itself between the Chief of Staff Dan Halutz and the Commander of the Northern Front etc. are manifestations of an unfolding internal crisis. As the liberal daily "Haaretz" warned on August 11, 2006, "the Olmert government could not survive a humiliating defeat" in Lebanon.

The poll conducted on August 9 and 10 showed "a marked decline in support of the government, and particularly for Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz" (Haaretz "Public believes IDF not winning the war" by Yossi Verter, August 11, 2006).

The change in public mood is manifested also by the opportunist adaptation to it by the so-called Zionist "Left", the "peace camp" of Peace Now and Meretz that like Zombies start to move after a month of carnage or writers such as Amos Oz, Abraham Yehoshua and David Grossman who, after supporting unashamedly the war now they pretend to be in favor of a "diplomatic solution". The second Lebanese war exposed the total political and moral bankruptcy of the Zionist "Left" and its "peace camp". The courageous Israeli Jewish anti-war fighters, who organized, from the start, under very adverse conditions, demonstrations and vigils in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, have to draw the necessary conclusions and break decisively from the stinking corpse of Zionism, "left", liberal or right. This barbaric war has to be stopped immediately, the Zionist and imperialist troops have to withdraw, all reservists have to return home, and all political prisoners to be liberated. The Zionism's "dual war" has and can be defeated by a united struggle of all its victims.

It has a strategic importance for victory to break the hold of Zionist control, now in crisis, over the Jewish workers and poor. The "conquest of Jewish labor", the historic slogan of Labor Zionism, proved to be nothing else than expulsion of the Arab masses and domination over a Jewish labor good only to be flesh for the IDF canons. The Jews workers have to emerge as a fighting collectivity, a politically independent class for itself. At the same time, the proletarianized Palestinian masses cannot continue to be atomized, under the control of a corrupt secular middle class and bourgeoisie in the PA or Islamic clericalist organizations that on the eve of this war were ready to accept the phony "two states solution", the 1967 borders and the legitimacy of the Zionist state. (See the common declaration of imprisoned leaders of Fatah, PFLP, Hamas and Islamic Jihad). The development of a revolutionary Marxist Party overcoming the ethnic and religious barriers and elaborating a new revolutionary strategy and tactics is the most urgent task. The comrades of the group Militants for the Fourth International, the CRFI Section in Israel/Palestine, fight for this goal, against enormous pressures and adversity, and have to be supported by all vanguard fighters in the area and internationally.

The precondition for Jewish emancipation is now the emancipation of the Palestinian people and the common struggle to overthrow the Zionist regime of national oppression and social misery, for one secular, democratic and socialist Republic in the entire historic territory of Palestine.

Against the imperialist tyranny misnamed as a "new Middle East", the interconnection of the explosive problems in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran can find a historic solution only by opening the road to a Socialist Federation of the peoples of the Middle East.

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