By John Pickard
Israel has carried out a massive attack on Hezbollah members in Lebanon, by methods that the mainstream press – had anyone else been responsible – would have described as a mass ‘terrorist’ attack. As many as five thousand low-tech pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded simultaneously in many parts of the country, not only killing Hezbollah members, but also non-members, including at least two children.
As this article is posted, at least twelve have been killed and thousands injured by these devices, with as many as three hundred suffering serious life-threatening injuries. Hospitals are said to be overwhelmed by the attack. The Iranian embassador to Lebanon is among those injured. In addition to the explosions in pagers, reports are coming in from Lebanon that other electronic devices and car bombs are exploding.
That Israel is responsible is hardly in doubt. Mossad, Israel’s external spying agency, is the only organisation with the necessary contacts around the world and the technical know-how to conduct such an operation. Besides which, it has used exactly the same method, albeit on a far more limited scale, to assassinate political opponents in the past.
This attack by the Israeli government can have only one meaning. It has no immediate strategic value and its only purpose seems be to provoke a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. The thousands of explosions across Lebanon came only hours after Netanyahu announced an additional ‘war aim’ for his government – an aim that can only be achieved through full-scale war.
New war aim of Netanyahu government
As well as the ‘total destruction’ of Hamas and the return of Israeli hostages –war aims that even many Israelis deem to be mutually incompatible – Netanyahu has just announced that his goverenment wants the return of the 60,000 displaced Israelis back in their homes in the north.
These evacuees – currently staying in hotels, empty homes and other properties in southern Israel – were moved from towns in the north because of the ongoing tit-for-tat missile and artillery exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah. The only way that those displaced can be returned to their homes, therefore, is by the complete ‘neutralisation’ of Hezbollah, that is, by a war in the north. That would entail not only the elimination of Hezbollah, but a likely israeli military occupation of a large part South Lebanon for the indefinite future.
It has been speculated that the attacks using electronic devices are a preliminary phase to a major Israeli assault on Lebanon.
Many Israelis have long thought that Netanyahu and his far right cabinet members are prolonging the one-sidded war in Gaza for no other reason than staying in office. The extension of conflict from Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon – whatever the consequences – is a price the Israeli government would pay to stay in power.
A limited, ‘low-level’ war has been going on between Hezbollah and the Israeli armed forces for almost a year, since the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7 last year and the overwhelming Israeli retaliation against Gaza which followed. On several occasions – such as when Israel assassinated the Hezbollah second-in-command with a missile strike – a larger-scale war has seemed inevitable, only for the possibility to recede. On this occasion, with possibly scores of Hezbollah activists killed and hundreds injured, and with the prestige of the leadership at stake, a major war looks more likely than at any time in the past year.
Western politicians have backed Israeli genocide in Gaza
If a full-scale war does begin in the north, it will not only be the responsibility of Netanyahu and his cabinet. It will also be on the shoulders of all of those western political leaders – we would include the ‘Labour leadership in this – who have backed Israel every step of the way in its genocidal war in Gaza.
Apart from the tens of thousands killed and injured (see inset left) Gaza has been bombed to rubble, in a bombing campaign more devastating in scale than anything comparable in the Second World War. Two and a quarter million Palestinians are now living on the edge of starvation and disease, forced to sleep under canvas or in temporary shelters, with even so-called ‘safe’ areas subject to deadly bombing almost every day.
The devastation and slaughter has had two important results outside of Gaza itself. The first is that in the eyes tens of millions of workers and youth around the world, Israel has been exposed as a monstrous and brutal government, intent on the destruction of Palestinians as a people. Apart from mainstream politians, popular sympathy for Israel is now at the lowest ebb in any time in its entire seventy-six year history. That in itself has huge implications for israel, politically, diplomatically and economically.
Reactionary Arab leaders are sitting on a powder keg
But the second effect is that reactionary Arab leaders, like General Sisi in Egypt, King Salman in Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah of Jordan – where half the population are Palestinian – feel themselves sitting on a powder keg. In the whole Arab world, there is growing anger at the genocide being visited on the the populations of Gaza and the semi-official pogroms against Palestinians on the West Bank, but anger, above all, at the failure of their governments to react to these atrocities.
Reactionary Arab leaders have always been among the greatest obstacles to the struggle of the Palestinian people for their rights, although they have often masqueraded as the ‘champions’ of Palestine.
As the most right wing cabinet in Israel’s history continues its policy of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, Arab governments will come under more pressure than ever before. What US and European political leaders fear, above all, are political and social upheavals in the Arab world and a new ‘Arab Spring’, even angrier and more intense than it was thirteen years ago.
Western leaders will not thank Netanyahu for his new war
If there is a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah in the North, American and European political leaders will rally around Israel and provide it with arms and diplomatic support on the supposed grounds that Israel was ‘fighting for its existence’. But behind the public statements (and the arms), they will not be thanking Netanyahu for pushing the entire region towards possibly the greatest cataclysm in its modern history.
In Israel itself, a war in the north will lead, as wars always do, to a temporary increase in popular support among Israelis for ‘their’ armed forces, despite the government. But a protracted and bloody war in Lebanon, alongside an ‘unfinished’ war in Gaza and the increasing involvement of the IDF in the West Bank – all of these factors will undermine support for Netanyahu.
There is no possibility of an Israel state providing a safe and secure homeland for Jewish people on the basis on unending wars on the Palestinian people and neighbouring Arab states. The Israeli far right are comfortable with Israel becoming a highly militarised and brutal ‘Spartan’ state, even if that means the complete removal of all civil and democratic rights from Arabs, and even the reduction of rights and democratic freedoms for the Jewish population.
But that is far from a universal sentiment among all Israelis. What the far right in Israel want to do and what they will be able to get away with, in the long term, may not be the same thing.
The Middle East is on the cusp of the biggest changes in a generation
The war in Gaza and the complete failure of the IDF to liberate more than a handful of the hostage still held by Hamas has already created profound tensions and divisions between and among Jews, and to an unprecedented degree. A war in the North would only exacerbate that sharp conflict tenfold.
The massive suffering and destruction that has taken place means that Gaza can never be the same again, politically or economically. The actions of Israel have all but guaranteed that a new generation of Palestinian militants is being created with the same or at least similar ideas to Hamas.
But if Gaza can never be the same again, neither can the Middle East as a whole, including Israel. We are on the cusp of titanic and earth-shattering changes in that region of the world.
What is missing from the equation is the intervention of the international workers’ movement, supporting and promoting struggle along the path of mutual solidarity between workers and for socialist change. Without this, unfortunately, the political earthquakes we are likely to see will not be an easy or a pleasant ride for any of the populations of the region, be they Jews or Arabs or any other peoples.
[All pictures from Al Jazeera TV newsfeed]
