On July 12 Israeli warplanes, helicopter gunships, missiles and artillery bombarded southern Lebanon. Over the next few days the Israeli government escalated its attack to include Beirut and much of northern Lebanon. Hundreds were killed, and a million fled for their lives, more than a quarter of the population.
Israeli bombs destroyed roads, bridges, airports, ports, storage facilities, power stations, water works, hospitals, schools and homes. The Israeli attack continued even after a UN ceasefire resolution, as the Israeli army tried to occupy Lebanon south of the Litani River as a "buffer" against Hezbollah and other Lebanese resistance fighters. The attack left southern Lebanon booby-trapped with mines and cluster bombs that will kill and maim for years to come.
Less than three weeks earlier, on June 25, the Israeli government had sent warplanes, helicopter gunships, tanks and soldiers into Palestinian Gaza. The Israeli attack destroyed buildings and homes, killed and wounded dozens of civilians, and took out half of Gaza's power grid, leaving water treatment plants and hospitals with no electricity. Israeli troops seized members of the Palestinian parliament and cabinet and other government officials. The incursions continued through July and August, masked by the greater destruction in Lebanon.
The Israeli government's pretexts for the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon were the capture of Israeli soldiers by resistance fighters. A Hamas raid had killed two Israel soldiers and captured a third. A Hezbollah raid had killed eight Israeli soldiers and captured two. Hamas and Hezbollah intended to exchange the captured soldiers for some of the 10,000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners of war held by Israel. Rather than exchange prisoners, as it had often done in the past, the Israeli government launched its long-planned assaults.
The Israeli government's immediate goal was to intimidate the Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian people, so that they would stop resisting Israel's apartheid strategy of annexing parts of the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Lebanese Shebaa Farms and the Syrian Golan Heights, walling Israel off from its Arab neighbors (literally, in the West Bank and Gaza), importing non-Arab "guest workers", and forever barring Arabs from returning to the lands seized in 1948 and 1967 and incorporated into Israel.
The Israeli government's further goal was to aid US imperialism's faltering war in Iraq. The US military is caught in a quagmire. All sections of the Iraqi population oppose the occupation, resistance fighters continue to target US and Iraqi forces, the infrastructure is still ruined, the economy is in a shambles, and sectarian conflicts among Sunnis, Shia and the Kurds are escalating into civil war.
Of the imperialist great powers only Britain continues to provide combat troops for the occupation, and British support is shaky, since most of the British people oppose the war. In the US 60 percent of respondents in polls say that the occupation is a mistake. With midterm elections this fall many Democrats and some Republicans are talking of withdrawal.
The Israeli attacks opened or, rather, escalated a second front in the imperialist war against the peoples of the Middle East. They were a warning to the Syrian and Iranian governments not to interfere, a reminder that they have an enemy even more implacable than US imperialism, an enemy whose population is willing to fight to the death in the Middle East, unlike most of the US population, an enemy armed with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. They were a warning to the collaborator Arab governments, particularly of Jordan and Egypt, to continue to suppress resistance to the occupations.
The attacks, made with the full approval of the US government, were also an attempt to shore up domestic US support for the Iraq war. Virtually all the major Democratic and Republican politicians endorsed the attacks. Those who were beginning to question the war on the Iraq front undermined themselves by supporting it on the Israel front. Under the pressure of Zionism, many in the antiwar movement kept silent about the Israeli attacks and pulled back from antiwar protests.
The US and Israeli governments have made a common mistake of colonial powers and colonial settlers in thinking that they could subdue the people they were trying to dominate by terror -- by "shock and awe", as the US named its initial assault on Iraq in 2003.
The Palestinian people have refused to be intimidated. They have never abandoned their dream of freeing their homeland. They expressed their resistance even in the January 2006 legislative elections, where they could choose only among poor alternatives: the corrupt and incompetent Fatah, the reactionary Hamas, and the relatively isolated left parties and independents.
Most of those who voted for Fatah were voting for resistance to the occupation and for a non-Islamist government. Most of those who voted for Hamas were voting for resistance to the occupation and for honest and competent government. And proportionally far more voted for the left than vote for the left in most European and Latin American elections and have ever voted for the left in the US.
The Palestinians refused to be intimidated by the Israeli and US attempts to strangle the Palestinian economy, because the people dared to vote for Hamas. They refused to be intimidated by Israel's killings of Palestinian leaders and its policy of terrorizing civilians through deliberately careless "collateral damage". They refused to be intimidated by the Israeli military incursions.
The Palestinian resistance took a complicated turn with the platform drafted by Mustafa Barghouti and other political prisoners, including both Fatah and Hamas fighters, calling for a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 boundaries, the right of return to the rest of Palestine, and focusing the resistance on the lands Israel occupied in 1967. Hamas and Fatah had just reached an accord on forming a national unity government based on the draft platform when Israel attacked.
The Israeli government understood that a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 boundaries with the right of return to the rest of Palestine would doom Israel as a Zionist state, since Palestinians, including the million already in Israel, would soon outnumber Jews in both parts of Palestine. They also understood that the proposal would seem eminently fair to non-Zionists who looked at the situation from a consistently democratic standpoint. The attack was Israel's answer.
The Lebanese people have also refused to be intimidated by Israel. For centuries Europeans used Lebanon as an entry to the Arab Middle East, maintaining an enclave via Lebanon's Maronite Christians. After World War I Britain and France set up a confessional government in newly independent Lebanon as part of their divide-and-rule scheme for the Middle East. Christians, Sunnis, Shia and Druze had fixed places in the government, with the Christian minority vastly overrepresented. The US continued this policy when it became the dominant imperial power in the region after World War II.
The Lebanese resistance became very left-wing in the 1970s, as the Lebanese left joined with the newly arrived Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been expelled from Jordan in September 1970 ("Black September") by the collaborationist government of King Hussein. The US, European and Israeli response to this was to foment civil war between the Christian-dominated government and the fascist Phalange (same name and outlook as the Spanish organization led by Francisco Franco), on one side, and the leftist Lebanese National Movement (LNM) and the PLO, on the other. The civil war lasted from 1975 to 1990.
The LNM/PLO militias had almost defeated the Christian militias in 1976 when Syria intervened to prevent a Christian defeat and to impose a truce. Israel initially supported the Syrian intervention but then invaded Lebanon in 1978 and, on a much larger scale, in 1982 to drive out the PLO. US, French and Italian troops occupied Beirut from 1982 to 1984, when suicide bombings drove them out. The civil war lasted another six years, as Christian forces allied with Israel continued fighting to maintain their dominance of the government and military.
The civil war ended in 1990, when Syrian and Lebanese forces finally defeated the recalcitrant Christian militias and installed a national unity government. 100,000 people had been killed, and the country was ruined. The Christian, Sunni, Shia, Druze and Palestinian populations were exhausted. The Lebanese left had been decimated.
Lebanon rebuilt from 1990 until 2006. Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, having decided that apartheid was less costly than occupation. The Shia-based Hezbollah militia, which had continued fighting the Israeli occupation, claimed victory and was acclaimed by all sections of the Lebanese population. The last Syrian troops withdrew in 2005.
The Israeli attack sought to break Lebanese resistance politically, as well as militarily, by dividing the population along sectarian lines and plunging the country back into civil war. So far this strategy has failed. Most Lebanese -- Muslim, Christian and secular -- supported Hezbollah and other resistance to the Israeli attack. Lebanon has lessons for Iraq. The Lebanese civil war shows the danger of degeneration into sectarian warfare. The resistance to Israel shows the possibility of unity.
Israel's attempt to wall itself off from the Arab world around it will fail, as its earlier attempt to establish a "greater Israel" empire failed. The US government finances and arms Israel, Jews around the world support it, the Israeli military is very powerful, and the Israeli capitalists can replace most Arab labor with cheap non-Arab labor, first non-European Jews, then Russian Jews, and now East European and Asian "guest workers". But the fundamental problem remains: five million Israeli Jews cannot dominate 300 million Arabs.
The defeat of South African apartheid shows what would be needed to defeat Israeli apartheid. South African whites were as committed to their privileges as Israeli Jews are to theirs. But Black workers' struggle, with worldwide support, made South Africa ungovernable and unprofitable. The South African capitalists, English-speaking and then Afrikaner, and the British, US and other foreign capitalists concluded that they had to accept Black-majority rule to restore order and profitability. They worked out a deal with the African National Congress to include Blacks in the government, professional and business elite, to allow whites to keep most of their privileges, and to continue the superexploitation of Black workers.
Workers' revolution would have led to a more favorable outcome, but the capitalists maneuvered successfully to avoid that. The defeat of apartheid was not the product of workers' revolution, but it was certainly the byproduct of workers' revolutionary struggle.
The key difference between South African apartheid and Israeli apartheid is that in South Africa the capitalists needed to exploit Black workers excluded from white areas, while in Israel they don't need to exploit excluded Palestinian workers. Their strategy is to make do with Jewish workers, Palestinian workers already in Israel, and non-Arab "guest workers".
Palestinian workers alone cannot defeat Zionism, because they're not essential enough to the Israeli or world economy to force an end to Israeli apartheid through industrial action or strong enough to defeat Israel militarily. But the workers of the Arab nation as a whole could easily defeat Zionism by making the Middle East and North Africa, with its immense energy resources, ungovernable and unprofitable.
The main obstacles to this are the division of the Arab nation into artificial states and capitalist rule in each of these states. If the Arab working class could unite the Arab nation behind it and take power away from the corrupt and reactionary Arab governments, it would have the numbers and resources to hold imperialism at bay. By its example it could inspire revolution elsewhere the semicolonies and even in the imperialist heartlands.
As in South Africa, the capitalists would maneuver. To preserve their rule they might jettison the Israeli settler state and make a deal with Arab nationalist and Islamist forces. In that event, Jewish capitalists in the imperialist countries and in Israel would prove no more loyal to Israeli apartheid than white capitalists were to South African apartheid.
We in the US can help by opposing our own imperialism in its wars and occupations and its support for Israel. We should build a movement against Israeli apartheid similar to the one against South African apartheid, with protests, boycotts and strikes. Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon show that neither the US nor Israel are invincible. But the popular resistance needs our help.