Martin Suchanek
After the deaths of twelve young football players in a rocket attack on the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Occupied Golan Heights on July 27, Israel immediately used the tragedy as a pretext for threatening a devastating onslaught on the forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
An early morning meeting of his security cabinet on July 29 authorised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant to launch a large-scale military strike against Hezbollah. They can decide on the timing and scale of attack. Israel has been carrying out limited military strikes against Hezbollah for months. Now, a retaliatory attack that greatly surpasses these could trigger a major expansion of the war in the region.
The Zionist government rushed to make use of the tragedy, blaming Hezbollah, which denied responsibility, and refusing to allow an international commission of inquiry into the country and to await its results. Indeed, the Druze villagers told media that what they fear most is precisely an Israeli escalation and regional war that could bring them even greater suffering. They angrily chased away government ministers, including the fascist Bezalel Smotrich, who turned up at the funerals to exploit their grief.
The Netanyahu government is clearly seeking a pretext for the escalation. In doing so, it is pursuing several goals. First, to distract from its ongoing war crimes and genocide in Gaza, and the terrorisation of the Palestinian population of the West Bank by right-wing settlers and the army. Second, by claiming the Hezbollah attack and the Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv represent a qualitative increase in the existential threat to Israel, they are trying to revive the tarnished image of a besieged „democracy“ defending itself against „encirclement“ by its enemies.
The Israeli government, along with its Western allies, realise that, around the world, including in Europe and North America, this justification is becoming less and less effective.
But even if Netanyahu’s Western allies themselves fear an expansion of the war and are also pushing for a cessation of the slaughter in Gaza, his government knows that they will not move to prevent a brutal retaliatory strike, “justified” as self-defence. After all, the United States is also bombing the Houthis for attacking ships of Israel’s allies in the Gulf of Aden. So how can Israel be denied the right to retaliation?
Thus, an escalation of Hezbollah’s conflict can be exploited to delay Western pressure for a negotiated solution for Gaza. Netanyahu may also be gambling on an election victory for Trump who, like the Israeli cabinet, basically understands a „peace solution“ to mean a complete surrender of Hamas and the Palestinian people.
Third, the escalation also has a domestic political function for Netanyahu. Against the growing protests, including from the Israeli population, he relies on the maintenance of tension to justify the war and genocide against the Palestinians by presenting the Zionist state as a besieged country constantly attacked by enemies from Iran, Yemen or Lebanon. Netanyahu knows that the appeal to the „unity of the nation“, to the prevailing Zionist ideology of the majority of the Israeli opposition, is a tried and tested means of weakening or demobilising it.
A Reactionary Adventure
To achieve his goals, the Netanyahu government is consciously playing with the danger of a regional war. Of course, they do not want another Lebanon war like in 2006, but they are playing with fire.
Precisely because there has been a constant, albeit limited, exchange of rockets between Israel and Hezbollah for months, an Israeli attack will, indeed must, reach a new level, hit Hezbollah painfully and publicly. This will mean not just numerous dead fighters, but probably many more dead civilians. Israel is counting on Hezbollah to limit itself to retaliation at a lower level, perhaps through the mediation of French imperialism or other allies of Israel, who might offer Hezbollah some compensation for restraint.
In its reactionary adventure, the Zionist regime is counting above all on the fact that Hezbollah and the Lebanese people fear a regional war and its imponderable risks more than an Israel punitive attack.
The barbaric, genocidal war against the Palestinians also serves as a threat by the murderous Netanyahu regime. Anyone who defends themselves with all their might against Israel, the strongest military power, heavily armed and financially supported by the West, must themselves fear being overwhelmed with a merciless war. This applies above all to the air superiority of the Zionist state. Militarily, neither Iran, nor Syria, and certainly not Yemen or Lebanon, can oppose them militarily at this level. In Gaza, the Israeli army also demonstrates daily what an occupation can mean.
However, this asymmetry also points to the character of Israel’s conflicts and wars. These are conflicts or wars between an oppressive state based on the expulsion and oppression of the Palestinian people, which at the same time fulfils the role of a political gendarme for Western imperialism, keeping the states of the region divided, fearful of attack, and incited against one another.
Just as the oppression of Palestinians within its borders serves to consolidate Zionist rule, Israel’s attacks on other states, or political movements within them, ultimately serve to consolidate a reactionary imperialist order based on exploitation and oppression and Israel’s role in it.
These wars are not about defending Jewish people around the world from antisemitism, which only serves as an ideological cloak to justify more and more wars and oppression. It is not about self-defence, but about expansion and (preventive) subjugation of all those who stand in the way of imperialism and Zionism. Every victory of Israel ultimately strengthens this reactionary order.
Today, it must be our goal to oppose the war adventure of the Israeli government by all means in order to oppose its threatened retaliatory strike. Therefore, we must continue to strengthen and build the movement in solidarity with Palestine and against the genocide worldwide and force the trade unions and the reformist parties in the countries allied to Israel to mobilise. We advocate a total halt to arms deliveries and any support for Israel, as well as a global workers’ boycott.
But it also means that we defend the right of Hezbollah and all the forces of resistance in Lebanon to oppose a Zionist attack. This has nothing to do with political support for Hezbollah. Rather, we resolutely reject their programme and goals (and also those of all other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces in Lebanon), we fight their Islamist, petty-bourgeois and counter-revolutionary ideology and policies, as they were particularly evident in Syria.
But the Israeli attacks are about punishing Hezbollah and the entire Lebanese people for their support of the Palestinians and making an example of what this leads to. Resistance to this is legitimate and deserves our support. In the event of a full scale war between Israel and Lebanese or Hezbollah-led forces, the working class worldwide must therefore stand for the defeat of Israel and the victory of the resistance.