“The British have given up and know they will be leaving Iraq soon. They are retreating because of the resistance they have faced. Without that they would have stayed for much longer, there is no doubt. The British have realised this is a war they should not be fighting.” Read more...

We call for action to prevent Israel and its imperialist allies from crushing resistance in Gaza and imposing its “two state” solution. Since the cause of the Palestinians is a vital part of the worldwide struggle against imperialism, to let that happen would be a defeat for all of us. It must not happen. Read more...

The USA, European Union and Israel are maintaining and intensifying a full-scale blockade of Gaza. The situation is getting harder for the 1.5 million inhabitants by the day. Two thirds already live below the poverty line. The United Nations estimates that they could start running out of flour, rice, oil and other essentials within weeks. Read more...

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, has declared a state of emergency and “dismissed” the three month old “unity government” of prime minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas. His action comes after seven days in which some 110 people died in fighting in Gaza between the Hamas militia and forces loyal to the President. When the Preventative Security building and the intelligence service headquarters in Gaza City finally fell to Hamas virtually the entire Gaza Strip was in its control. Read more...

Since January US forces in Iraq have been implementing the new “surge” policy that was agreed by the White House towards the end of last year. 21,500 additional troops and tougher rules of engagement were, argued the Bush administration, to resolve the security crisis in Iraq, put an end to the insurgency and bolster the authority of the Iraqi government. Read more...

The mass demonstrations in Turkey and the political manoeuvrings by the military and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have exposed the contradiction that exists at the heart of Turkish politics. The battle lines are drawn around the fight for secularism against an encroaching Islamisation of society by the AKP, yet this is not the full story. Read more...

The starting point for a revolutionary party’s programme in Palestine and the surrounding countries must be the struggle against imperialism and its wide variety of local agents. The world-hegemonic imperialist power-the USA with its fleets in the Mediterranean and the Gulf defends “its” oil and the semi feudal rentier regimes it props up in the Arabian peninsular with a limitless arsenal. Yet as its ignominious fiasco in Iran and its inglorious retreat from Lebanon shows it is far from invincible when the masses are roused against it even under the most appalling leadership. This “leadership” whether Stalinist, bourgeois nationalist or clerical reactionary can however only score partial and limited victories against the USA and its agents. Read more...

Iraqi trade unions have taken a firm stance against the pillage of the country’s natural resources by rejecting the proposed hydro-carbon bill, which will hand over the country’s oil and gas reserves to multinational companies. Read more...

While the West plots “regime change” in Iran, Simon Hardy reviews a new book on the class struggle inside the country, a timely reminder that regimes can also be changed from below Read more...

The imperialist occupiers may be desperate to dig themselves out of the Iraqi quagmire but this in no way reduces their warmongering. The US - with its British lap dog in tow and and its Israeli guard dog straining at the leash - is preparing for air strikes against Iran. Read more...

Simon Hardy reports from the ’With the resistance for a just peace in the Middle East’ conference that took place in Tuscany, Italy between the 24th and 25th March. The conference brought together a number of anti-imperialist resistance movements from across the Middle East including representatives from the Iraqi resistance. It has been a failing of the mass anti-war movements in the west that they have not attempted to build similar conferences and hence the conference provided a real insight into the politics of the Middle Eastern resistance movements but it also revealed real tensions and divisions. Read more...

The US-led coalition occupying Iraq is rapidly falling apart. The much-heralded 21,500 extra troops sent in January were largely National Guard reservists. The frontline troops consist of war-weary regular soldiers, denied leave for months. A recent poll revealed that only 17 per cent of them still support the war. Read more...

Last November George W Bush received a thumping rejection of his war on Iraq in the mid-term elections. In January he sent 21,500 more troops into battle. This is what democracy looks like. Read more...

With dozens dead and hundreds injured, recent clashes between Fateh and Hamas have threatened to escalate into civil war. Security forces loyal to Fateh have fought with Hamas militias and special operation units that patrol much of the Gaza Strip against a backdrop of appalling social conditions. The quality of life in Gaza has dropped dramatically since the West imposed sanctions after the election of Hamas. Read more...

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese - maybe over a million according to Al Jazeera- flowed through the streets of Beirut to protest against the attempt by the United States, backed by France and Israel, to force the withdrawal of Syrian troops and install a regime subservient to their interests. Read more...

After its defeat in Lebanon, the Israel Defence Force (IDF) acted as all humiliated armies do: it took its revenge against a weak and unarmed civilian population; the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. These atrocities, in contrast to those in Lebanon, have gone largely unreported. The last five months have seen the deaths of 479 Palestinians (of whom 80% were civilians), with 4,200 injured. Israel’s casualties have consisted of two soldiers and one civilian. Read more...

In mid-November, 400 delegates from every continent met in Beirut to demonstrate their solidarity with resistance against US imperialism and Israel and to discuss future perspectives for the anti-imperialist struggle.
Michael Proebsting reports.\n\nLebanese politics has always been a complicated affair, based as it is on a sectarian distribution of seats to religious groupings, none of which has an absolute majority. The state itself was cut out of Syria at the end of the First World War by French imperialism, which received it in a League of Nations Mandate. Their purpose was to provide a substantial social basis for holding on to this mercantile and banking centre of the eastern Mediterranean. For this purpose they gave the Maronite Christians (eastern rite Catholics) a politically privileged position in terms of numbers of seats in the parliament, and the key positions in the government, despite the fact that they are a minority of the population. Read more...

The conference attracted activists not only from the Middle East and Europe but also from the Philippines, South Korea, Australia, Congo, Canada. Among the many political currents, in addition to Hisbollah, were the Lebanese Communist Party, the Lebanese Democratic People’s Party, the National Committee for Unification of Communists in Syria, the PFLP and the DFLP. Read more...

The People’s Right to Resistance

In order to transform the historic victory achieved by the Lebanese resistance against the Israeli aggression which targeted the Lebanese population on the 12th of July 2006, into an incentive for reinvigorating the struggle for comprehensive Arab liberation and to direct it against the Zionist and Imperialist project and to consolidate global solidarity with the resistance of the Arab people in addition to their national resistance in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq within the framework of supporting the people’s right to resistance, the “International Conference in Support of the Resistance” was held in Beirut from the 16th-19th of November 2006, in response to an invitation from: Hizbullah, the Lebanese Communist Party, The People’s Movement, The National Unity Forum, and al-Leeqa’. Approximately 400 representatives from all over the world participated on behalf of tens of political, trade-unionist, civil, anti-globalization, anti-war and anti-imperialist movements that support the people’s right to freedom and progress. Read more...

Brothers and sisters, comrades!

Our conference takes places at a decisive historical moment. Only three months ago the Lebanese Resistance defeated the Zionist state’s attempt to occupy Lebanon. Yet the major imperialist powers are still seeking to transform Lebanon into a disarmed buffer zone for Israel. The latter continues to kill and starve the Palestinian people and transforms the Gaza Strip into a huge, open-air prison with not a word of protest from the “civilised” western powers. At the same time the barbarous occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US and EU continues. As if this is not enough they are also threatening Iran and Syria with similar atrocities. Read more...

On May 1st 2003 George Bush stood on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln and bragged, ‘Mission accomplished’. But now Bush and Blair’s claims to be winning the war in Iraq look about as credible as the statements of Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Saddam’s Minister for Information when he claimed on TV that the Iraqi forces were defeating the US army’s push into Baghdad. “Aren’t those American tanks we can see behind you?” the interviewer asked. Today Bush and Blair’s claims that they are on the verge of victory are belied by every TV report coming out of Iraq. Read more...

A Marxist analysis of the political and economic background of the Israeli state and how the creation of it was a racist act suported by Imperialism.\nZionism, as a colonial settler movement during the first part of the 20th century, had to be strategically allied to one imperialist power or another. Not only did these powers provide the funds for settlement but more importantly they controlled the Middle East. British imperialism was hegemonic there from 1918 until 1947-53 when it was supplanted by the USA. Read more...

This article is also available in Arabic here

Despite the ceasefire in Lebanon, Israeli Defence Forces have continued the cynically named Operation Summer Rain in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This consists of a massive bombardment of homes, workplaces and infrastructure and constant low flights to terrorise the civilian population. The actions of the Israelis constitute a cruel collective punishment, in breach of the Geneva Conventions, and international law. The silence from governments around the world is deafening. Read more...

لى الرغم من وقف إطلاق النار في لبنان ، واصلت قوات الدفاع الإسرائيلية عمليتها التي أطلقت عليها بسخرية اسم أمطار الصيف في الضفة الغربية وقطاع غزة. Read more...

Iran’s clerical rulers are celebrating the fifth anniversary of their “Islamic Republic". They do so against a background of temporary economic stability and in a country where all open opposition has been mercilessly crushed. Read more...

Workers, youth and oppressed people around the world unite in support of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance!
Israel has declared war on Lebanon. The entire Middle East trembles on the brink of another war, fomented by the aggressively expansionist state of Israel and backed as usual by he United Sates and its European allies. The League for the Fifth International appeals to the international anti-war and labour movement not to stand aside but to rally the maximum forces to oppose this barbaric aggression and to actively support the legitimate and heroic resistance of the Palestinian and Lebanese people.\n\nIn the past few weeks the Israeli army invaded the Gaza Strip. Now it is attacking Lebanon on land, from the sea and from the air- an action they have called “ operation Just Reward. ?Their pretext is the capture of one Israeli soldier in Gaza by Hamas fighters and two soldiers captured by Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon. Israel has announced that it will ‘degrade’ Lebanon’s infrastructure and had begun to bomb Beirut’s airport and certain key roads. Dan Halutz, the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) threatened “If the soldiers are not returned we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years." Read more...

For four weeks Israeli forces dropped every type of high-tech bomb onto the villages of southern Lebanon, onto the Shia suburbs of south Beirut, onto the roads, airports and communications systems of the tiny country. They have done billions of dollars of damage to homes and workplaces of the poorest sectors of Lebanese society. Yet they could not break the will to resist of Hezbollah and the Lebanese masses. By the end it was Israel that faced an abyss - a land war, hand-to-hand with Hezbollah fighters, in the wrecked villages and towns of southern Lebanon which are their home territory. Read more...

After invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq the Anglo-American alliance, with various European supporters, has focused its attention on undermining the relative independence of Iran and Syria. Blair and Bush have made it clear that here too they seek regime change - i.e. to install compliant puppet regimes, which promote globalisation and submit absolutely to their “war on terror”. The occupation of Iraq has turned into a bloody quagmire for the US, so an immediate and unprovoked attack is neither militarily nor politically possible. Read more...

A month of ‘shock and awe’ and still Israel could not reach the Litani river

The United Nations Security Council Ceasefire has ended hostilities in Lebanon - temporarily at least. The only side celebrating victory is Hezbollah, alongside the Palestinians and the Arab masses right across the Middle East. Everybody knows that claims by Ehud Olmert and George Bush to have won by severely degrading Hezbollah’s forces are ridiculous lies. Read more...

What this war is about?

The war now being waged by Israel in Lebanon and Gaza is not a defensive national war but an expansionist and aggressive one – aimed at consolidating and increasing the seizure of Palestinian lands and turning Lebanon into another buffer state to guarantee its borders. It is also a war that Israel is waging as a proxy of United States imperialism and its ever-loyal British ally to advance the conquest of the Middle East and seize its vast oil reserves. Read more...