By JAMES MARKIN
As the Israeli army ruthlessly bombs Beirut and Israeli troops advance into southern Lebanon, the people of the country are suffering mass casualties every day. The Lebanese Health Ministry reports that over 2,700 people have been killed by Israeli attacks during the past year, and over 400,000 have fled into Syria. In the face of this carnage, the Lebanese army has withdrawn from the south, leaving behind only Hezbollah and UN peacekeepers in the way of the invading Israeli army. For those not familiar with the situation in Lebanon, the idea of a sovereign nation’s army withdrawing in the face of a military invasion might seem shocking. But both the Lebanese ruling class and the various imperialist ruling classes have systematically neglected the interests of the people since the country gained independence from the French in 1943.
History of imperialism in Lebanon
After the First World War, British and French imperialisms divided the Middle East between them in the notorious Sykes-Picot agreement. The French got Syria and—drawing on their long claim as “protectors” of the Christians of the Middle East—proceeded to carve out Lebanon in order to be a homeland for the Maronite Christians. While this sectarianism might have been the justification, Lebanon was one of several mini-Syrias that the French created, with the goal to make Syria easier to rule. The French High Commissioner for the Levant, Henri Gouraud, remarked of this strategy, “It will be easy to maintain a balance among three or four [Syrian] states that will be large enough to achieve self-sufficiency and, if need be, pit one against the other.”
In fact, the borders of Lebanon never made any sense as a Christian homeland since, with the Muslim-majority city of Tripoli and other populous Muslim areas included, the country was never able to boast a Christian majority. As the Syrian nationalist George Samné once put it, “What kind of a ‘Christian homeland’ is this, where half of the population is Muslim?”
However, the lack of a Christian majority was not the cause of Lebanon’s troubles. Instead, Lebanon has suffered from debt and exploitation by imperialist powers, and endured a series of major economic and social crises. As if these problems weren’t enough, Lebanon has been a victim of Israeli aggression from the beginning. Israeli troops entered Lebanon and destroyed villages during the Nakba in 1948, and Lebanon received huge numbers of Palestinian refugees then and in the 1967 Naksa that followed.
Away from home and without citizenship in Lebanon, this refugee population looked to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in order to provide services for them in the refugee camps. In 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon with the goal of wiping out the PLO in the country. Israel’s use of heavy and indiscriminate artillery fire flattened Lebanese villages, killing thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
Ultimately, the PLO was forced to withdraw, and the UN drew the “blue line” demarking the border between Israel and Lebanon as well as the zone between the border and the Litani River. After five months of carnage, Israel withdrew back across the blue line and the UN established the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFL). Since the 1970s, a series of Israeli invasions of Lebanon have occurred, with the most recent one being in 2006. Each time, the UN failed to prevent the invasion, and the “peacekeepers” ended up more as reporters on what was happening, rather than actually keeping the peace.
U.S. imperialism is behind this invasion.
Now Israel has invaded Lebanon again. It has been clear since the very beginning of Israel’s campaign of genocidal violence in Gaza that an invasion of Lebanon was on the table. That was especially given that Hezbollah rocket attacks, intended to deter Israel’s killing in Gaza, forced Israel to evacuate much of its population from the extreme north of the country, including from the Syrian territory it still occupies—the Golan Heights. This exodus from the north has only contributed to Israel’s broader economic crisis, which threatens to hamper Israel’s conduct in its genocidal war. By invading Lebanon, Israel is hoping to degrade Hezbollah as a fighting force, and push them across the Litani River, allowing them to return Israeli workers to the north and in so doing, potentially provide help to their flagging economy.
The policy of the Biden White House toward Lebanon has shifted. While Biden has long signaled his frustration with the Israeli war effort and has said he was working to contain it in order to prevent regional war, his policy toward the war in Lebanon is one of thinly veiled support. An article for the New Republic reported that while Biden was publicly making unconvincing appeals for Israel not to invade Lebanon, behind closed doors his top aides were signaling a green light. Since then, U.S. government officials have openly celebrated the Israeli murder of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah without any reservations. These examples clearly show that Biden supports Israel’s carnage in Lebanon for the time being.
This is because the United States sees an opportunity in this war against Lebanon. This has been stated in public by Amos Hochstein, a business advisor to the White House, who was recently dispatched to the Levant as part of the broader US diplomatic offensive. In discussions with the acting Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, Hochstein stated that the administration’s previous ceasefire plan for Lebanon was “off the table” and that now the priority should be on electing a new president for Lebanon. The country has been without a president for two years, a situation that many have blamed on Hezbollah as its political allies have sought to prevent the selection of a candidate not aligned with their interests. Indeed, the U.S. is not a neutral party here; just like Hezbollah, they want to make sure that any president selected is amenable to Washington.
Hochstein, speaking to Lebanese broadcaster LBI, made a Freudian slip when saying that a solution to the war would come after there had been “a comprehensive effort to have the Lebanese armed forces strengthened, have them deployed in the south as they should be deployed across all quarters of Lebanon … [and] at the same time, have a new government, once we elect, select—once Lebanon selects—a new president, that is how we bring about the end of this conflict.” This slip of the tongue represented only a slightly clearer version of what Hochstein had said previously in public: The U.S. sees this war as an opportunity to weaken Hezbollah and create a more stable Lebanese government under U.S. influence.
Standard Israeli policy: Kill all witnesses
Israel is prosecuting the war in Lebanon using the tactics it has honed in Gaza—mass terror bombings. Lebanon, unlike Gaza, however, is an independent country that has not been fully been cut off from the rest of the world. While Israel’s international PR could not be worse, it is clear that in Lebanon there are more eyes watching what the IDF is doing. This is why, just as in Palestine, Israel has carried out a campaign of death against journalists. Out of the many cases of Israeli assaults on journalists in Lebanon, one case that has been particularly well documented is the murder of Issam Abdallah last year. A report recently released by the UNIFIL peacekeepers states that Abdallah was “likely” killed when an Israeli tank crew unleashed machinegun fire against a group of journalists near the Israeli-Lebanese border.
It is this exact kind of report that has caused Israeli aggression against the UNIFIL mission. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly called for the UN to withdraw the UNIFIL mission from southern Lebanon, while Israeli government-linked propaganda accounts have accused the UNIFIL of providing cover for Hezbollah. Meanwhile, Israeli troops on the ground in Lebanon have repeatedly attacked and made aggressive actions towards UNIFIL peacekeepers. The most egregious incident occurred on Oct. 13, when an Israeli tank brigade forced entry into a UNIFIL base and detonated shells that emitted a noxious gas that hospitalized 13 UNIFIL personnel, despite their gasmasks. More recently, on Oct. 20, Israeli bulldozers demolished UNIFIL watchtowers along the Israeli border. The message that Israel is sending is clear; they want to push out the peacekeepers in order to remove potential witnesses to their crimes.
This Israeli aggression against the UNIFIL personnel has resulted in an international backlash, especially from countries such as Ireland and Italy, which contribute significant numbers of troops towards the UNIFIL mission. However, as usual, this kind of backlash is unlikely to make Israel back down as long as the United States continues to support it. Just as always, United Nations rules and resolutions are merely suggestions as long as you have the backing of one of the permanent Security Council members. While the role that the UNIFIL plays as passive recorders and reporters on Israeli war crimes in Lebanon is positive, it falls far short of any of the alleged goals of the United Nations. The UNIFIL ultimately will not do anything to protect the people of Lebanon as the Israeli war machine rolls over their homes.
Who will defend the people of Lebanon?
Despite much of the rhetoric in the Western capitalist press, ultimately, the destabilizing force in Lebanon is not Hezbollah but Israel. As long as the Israeli process of dispossession of the Palestinian people continues, it will need to have control over its neighboring Arab countries, whose working-class populations loath Israel and see it for what it really is—a state meant to rule over the complete dispossession of the Palestinian people. Without Israeli control over these countries, this broader Arab working class represents an existential threat to the Zionist state.
In Lebanon, this continued friction is part of what created Hezbollah as existing political institutions failed to stop Israel’s violations of Lebanese sovereignty and massacres of its people. Even if Israel and the U.S. are able to defeat Hezbollah, which seems unlikely, something new will arise in its place to play the same role and represent the same interests. That said, it is clear that in the current war, the best outcome for the people of Lebanon would be for Hezbollah to prevail over the invading Israeli forces. As long as Israeli troops remain in Lebanon, there is little possibility of positive change.
This again raises the question: who can defend the Lebanese people? We know that the U.S. and Israel are willing to butcher countless thousands in Lebanon in order to their way. The existing state apparatus of Lebanon is paralyzed, caught between different capitalist camps—those fully under the influence of the U.S. and those whose interests don’t align at this moment. The United Nations, the Lebanese state, Hezbollah, etc., all merely represent different capitalist interests that have so far failed to protect the Lebanese people. If the people of Lebanon are to see a new day in which they don’t have to worry about bombs falling on their homes and invading soldiers walking their streets, they need to rise up and take matters into their own hands.
The only solution lies with the defeat and destruction of the State of Israel, the end of U.S. imperial domination over the Levant, and ultimately, the overthrow of the existing social system in Lebanon and the Middle East. The only forces with the power to carry out this revolutionary change are the working people of Lebanon, united in struggle with the Arab working people of the entire region. Together, they have the power to build a future in which life is valued and peace reigns.
