STOP THE SLAUGHTER! ISRAEL OUT OF LEBANON! STOP ROCKET ATTACKS ON ISRAELI CIVILIANS!

The hundreds of civilian casualties and the vast destruction of the infrastructure of Lebanon’s economic and social life by the Israeli armed forces is provoking world-wide indignation and anger. And so it should!

Does Israel have a right to defend itself from those whose stated political and military objective is to wipe out the Jewish nation? Yes, it has. But, apart from any other considerations, the disparity of power as between Israel and Lebanon, and Israel and the Palestinians, is such that the reckless destruction and slaughter in Lebanon can not be justified in terms of Israel’s need to defend itself.

If it is true, and it is, that there is an important difference between the deliberate targeting and slaughter of civilians and even reckless disregard for ancillary "collateral" civilian casualties in a military operation, it is also true that there is a recklessness and indifference to civilian "ancillary" casualties that is not in its effects always easy to distinguish from the deliberate slaughter by Islamic and other terrorists. Yes, Hisbullah (and Hamas) deliberately site themselves and their rocket-launching bases in the heart of civilian populations. That does not justify a power acting from a position of immense military strength in saying, "so be it, the responsibility is theirs", to the ensuing slaughter of civilians.

The international revulsion against Israel is justified.

Yet one’s attitude to a war can not be determined by such details as who is strongest, who suffers most casualties, who fired the first shot or who invaded the others’ territory. We have to look at the overall context of this war, the political situation out of which it erupted, and what aims the different combatants pursue in the region and in the war. Here, from a socialist, anti-Clerical-Fascist and anti-Imperialist point of view, we will review the arguments in favour of the war Israel is conducting, and then those against it.

First, the case for Israel. Hisbullah sparked the present war by attacking Israel and killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers; it rains rockets on Israel population centres. Hisbullah is a political and military organisation which is committed to the root and branch destruction of the Jewish nation. It is a fact that Hisbullah was gathering the forces and equipment for a war on Israel at the time of its own - or Iran’s - choosing. Hisbullah is backed, financed, armed and - to put it at it’s weakest - influenced by Iran, whose elected leader recently avowed his intention to destroy Israel, and which is trying to arm itself with nuclear weapons. It is not implausible that Hisbullah sparked war with Israel now in order to take international, and in the first place, US, pressure off Iran and Syria. Syria’s recent withdrawal from Lebanon, under US compulsion, may have produced in the Syrian regime a drive to use its continuing political influence in Lebanon to demonstrate that in its absence things there quickly get out of control.

It is a fact also, and politically it is very important, that in spite of Israel’s great military strength, many Israelis feel battered, bruised and insecure after years of suicide-bomb attacks, the recent reiteration of intent to destroy the Jewish nation by one of the region’s great powers, Iran, and the rocketings and raids into Israel from the recently Israel-vacated Gaza - and the not too long ago Israel-vacated Southern Lebanon. These experiences - on top of the disappointment that what Israeli’s saw as the offer of great concessions to the Palestinians produced not peace but the second intifadha and then the suicide-bombers - explain why public opinion in Israel is massively and vigorously behind Israel’s war in the Lebanon.

Israel is seeking to deal out maximum damage to its avowed, formidable and implacable enemies, who are in political terms clerical fascists intent on establishing theocratic-military dictatorships throughout the Middle East. It is argued that Hisbullah presented such a threat that Israel had to act, and act now. Israel’s actions are presented by its government as part of George Bush’s War on Terror.

The case against Israel can conveniently start at this point. If the result of what Israel is doing were to be the wiping out of the clerical-fascist Islamic Hisbullah, then serious socialists would have cause to rejoice. But unless Israel does wipe out Hisbullah - and, all things considered, that is scarcely conceivable; certainly the commentating military experts doubt that it can be wiped out by this sort of action - then the effect of what it is doing in Lebanon is likely to be the opposite of such an outcome. Like Nasser after the failure of Britain, France and Israel in the Suez affair of 1956, Hisbullah will come out of this strengthened in prestige, and thereby in recruits and money. Israel is throwing petrol-on-the-fires of Islamic political outrage and upsurge. It will further inflame the whole region, and increase, not staunch, the flow of recruits and money to Hisbullah and other Islamic-Fascist political organisations.

Cut off the Hisbullah, Hamas, or Muslim Brotherhood head of political Islam and it will, like the mythical beast which grew two heads where one was cut off, sprout others. It does not follow that it is always pointless to cut off a given Islamic-fascist "head"! This is not an argument against trying to destroy Islamic clerical fascism. It is an argument that what Israel is doing - and what Britain, the USA and others do in Iraq - is not an effective way to fight political Islam.

Whatever the eventual outcome of US-British, etc, occupation of Iraq, this is surely one of the obvious lessons of the last three years there. (and the prospect for a "good" outcome in Iraq, even the creation of a viable bourgeois-democratic regime there, grow daily more remote, and less and less the likely outcome.)

But, just as the actions of Hamas and Hisbullah, and their murderous tactics against Israeli civilians, must be seen in the political context of their objective to destroy Israel, so Israel’s actions cannot be assessed politically apart from its overall policy and political goals. What are those?

They are not the goals, or the appropriate activities, of a state concerned to survive, stabilise, achieve peace in security with its Arab neighbours. Israel is engaged in annexing a large part of the Palestinian West Bank territory which Israel has occupied since 1967; it is - as far as we can make sense of what it is doing - intent on preventing the emergence of an independent Palestinian state; it relies on its client relationship with the USA to offset the political-military cost of annexation.

In this, Israel must be condemned even by people who support the existence of the Jewish state and recognise that it has a right to defend itself, by war where necessary.

Here a semi-digression: It is not for us to try to stipulate where in relation to the existing Jewish-Palestinian peoples there, the border in the West Bank should be drawn, or argue that the Jewish settlements there should be uprooted entirely. No more than we would shout: "Arabs Out Of Israel!" should socialists, even implicitly, raise the slogan, "Jews Out Of The West Bank!" Adjustments to the Israeli- Jordanian border of 40 years ago may reasonably be thought by Israelis to be necessary. There is however a bottom line to any such adjustments of the 1967 border: if the result leaves less than an independent Palestinian state in its own contiguous territory, then it will not be justice for the Palestinians, nor is likely to prove a real solution.

Some commentators see one root of the war in Lebanon in the need for Prime Minister Olmert to establish himself as an authoritative, tough and ruthless leader, so that he will have the authority to organise Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank in the course of imposing an Israeli "unilateral settlement" and "final" borders between Israel and the Palestinian-majority territory outside the Great Wall of Israel, which will define and guard its borders.

The Israeli argument in favour of unilateral border-drawing, that there are no strong Palestinian "partners for peace", would be more convincing and carry more moral authority if Israel had not, again and again acted to undermine possible Political partners for peace amongst the Palestinians (by re-occupying the West Bank in 2002, for instance).

One of the perennial aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict is, again and again, a tacit alliance, a playing off of each other in a gruesome tit-for-tat interaction of the Islamic clerical-fascists - Hamas most noticeably in the last period - and the chauvinists of Israeli nationalism, each honing its own self-righteousness off the existence and the deeds of the other.

Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that it is true that there is no "partner for Peace" with which Israel can deal politically to work out a multilateral agreement; suppose therefore that unilateral Israeli border-drawing is the only way forward, the only way of disentangling two hopelessly entangled antagonistic peoples. In that case, then one of two things.

Either: the Israeli state, deciding its borders without Palestinian collaboration or agreement, will use its own great strength and its present relationship with the world super-power, judiciously, justly, benignly and with an eye to creating the conditions for an agreed, a multilateral, settlement as soon as possible;

Or: it will act as by all indications it plans to act - unjustly, chauvinistically, out of the narrowest national egotism that can only stimulate narrow national egotism and Islamic sectarianism on the other side, act in a way to leave Palestinians and other Arabs with a burning sense of grieviance that will persist poisonously for generations.

In the first course, Israel acts unilaterally from strength, but nonetheless draws and imposes borders that would allow a viable Palestinian state in contiguous territory to come into existence, and thus begin to satisfy the desires of the Palestinians (in so far as Israel can satisfy them without doing injustice to the Jewish Nation).

The all-too-easy Israeli answer to this is that the Palestinian quasi-state that came into existence in the second half of the 90s under the Oslo Agreement eventually came to mean that the Palestinian irreconcilables had a territorial base from which to attack Israel. But it can not be mantained even if, for the sake of argument, we agree to blame the Palestinians entirely for the breakdown in 2000, that the Palestinians should hereafter have no national rghts except those that Israel, from its own nationalist egotism, is prepared to grant them. That is the attitude turned round of the Arab and Islamic chauvenists to Israel!

Apart from being monstrously unjust, it is political nonsence. Israel does not have the right to stifle and destroy the Palestinian nation as a political entity - and that is what is involved here - any more that the Palestinians and the Arab and Islamic states have the right to destroy Israel.

As of now, Israel intends to annexe a sizable chunk of the West Bank and to leave to the Palestinians only pieces of segmented territory which would be neither a state, independent nor, probably, viable. Not so much a failed Palestinian state as a state deliberately disabled from the start.

Israel’s present military activities cannot be assessed apart from that, its all-defining plan for its future relationship with the Palestinian people.

Of course it is possible to construct more or less plausible political scenarios, for the more or less distant future, in which the Palestinian territories would unite with Jordan (as the West Bank was, until the 1967 war). That, if it were to happen would be in the incalculably distant future. Even then it probably would not satisfy the Palestinians.

Nations are created in the turmoils and cross-currents of history. Palestine was an entity carved out of southern Syria by the British and French regional overlords at the end of the First World War. It existed for only 30 years before 1948-9. To talk of a Palestinian nation, distinct fron other Arabs, in 1918 would have been nonsence. No such distinct entity existed then; but it does exist now. A Palestinian nation, distinct and self-recognising, has emerged in the course of the long conflict with Israel. The Palestinians too have national rights.

Israel’s chauvinistic attitude and intentions towards the Palestinians is central to defining what Israel is and represents in its wars in Lebanon and Gaza. It is not only intent on smashing Hizbullah, something which in isolation would be good and progressive work. It is intent on achieving maximum freedom to deal with the Palestinians as the least enlightened Israeli chauvinists think fit.

If Israel were to pursue a truly benign, truly democratic policy - even unilaterally in so far as it could be done unilaterally - it would over time cut much - by no means all, but nonetheless, much - of the ground from under the feet of Arab and Islamic clerical fascism. Its actions, including its drive against Hisbullah and Hamas would have a very different weight and meaning.

As things are, Israel must be condemned not only for the brutal inhumanity of what it is doing in Lebanon - but fundamentally, because of the overall policy and its overall role in the region, of which Lebanon is a part.

TWO STATES FOR THE TWO PEOPLES!

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/6686