Since the massacre perpetrated by Hamas a year ago on October 7, Israeli leaders feel free to do whatever they want.
Intense bombing has turned the Gaza strip into a wasteland, killing more than 42,000 men, women and children and inflicting endless suffering on the survivors. Incursions by the Israeli army and far-right militia in the Left Bank have caused around 600 deaths.
The Israel army has taken the liberty of striking and killing in Syria, Yemen and Iran. And, since Friday, has launched an all-out war against Hezbollah, relentlessly bombarding Lebanon, turning neighborhoods, villages and whole regions into heaps of rubble.
Israeli leaders consider themselves entitled to do as they please. Netanyahu was even bold enough to launch the operation that killed Hassan Nasrallah from within the UN headquarters in New York!
And why wouldn’t he? The U.S., backed by the major European powers, give him their unconditional support. Yes, they have called on him to hold back and regularly talk of a cease-fire. But they have never stopped delivering arms to him.
Both Biden and Kamala Harris have congratulated Netanyahu for the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, calling it ‘a measure of justice’. How can it be ‘justice’ when a bomb weighing more than a ton explodes in a residential neighborhood, making victims of hundreds of men, women and children?
There is one and only one way to describe Israel’s actions in Lebanon and Gaza: state terrorism. And the only way this terrorism differs from that of Hamas or Hezbollah is the greater quantity of arms available to the former –a state that is highly armed with the open or tacit approval of the major powers.
When Zionist leaders decided to build a Jewish state on land inhabited by Palestinians, they condemned Israelis to an endless war. From being oppressed, the people of Israel became an oppressive force. And, over the years, the state of Israel has become the most reliable and experienced fighting wing of imperialism, tasked with holding in check any regimes, such as Iran, judged to be too independent by the U.S.
Nowadays, the imperialist order in the Middle East is inseparable from Israeli-state terrorism and its expansion, colonization and annexation policy. It’s the same imperialist order that destroyed Iraq and tore Syria apart. It’s the same imperialist order that has plunged all the peoples of the region into social and political crises that never stop.
The Lebanese are well aware of this! Colonial France drew their borders which artificially separated them from Syria. And their political system, based on dividing communities, was also designed by the colonial powers in order to weaken the future state and keep it dependent on them.
The Lebanese population, of which a fraction is made up of Palestinian refugees, paid for this design with fifteen years of civil war, from 1975 to 1990. Lebanon has become the arena in which all the powers in the region clash, each one giving their support to one religious militia or another.
Many Lebanese explain how stressed they are at continually being hostages of a war that isn’t theirs. This is in fact the case for all peoples in the region.
In these clashes and in what opposes Israel to the Palestinians, it’s not a war between Jews and Muslims. It’s about knowing who will continue to rule over the region, who will profit from the crude oil and under what conditions, and who will control the marine trade through the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez canal.
This is what the imperialist powers but also Iran and nationalist parties like Hamas and Hezbollah are concerned by. They have shown that, when in power, their problem is not to reduce poverty for their peoples. By adding their weight to the warmongering, their only aim is to grab a bigger share of the spoils and profit from the same system of exploitation and pillage.
We need to escape from the bloody stalemate of nationalism and try to build a shared future. This can only be done if the workers and the oppressed of the world have the will to unite across borders and nationalities to overthrow imperialism and the capitalist class that is running it. That fight of course starts in our own country.
Nathalie Arthaud