Stop the slaughter!

Submitted by Anon on 13 August, 2006 - 5:41

The Israeli armed forces have inflicted a vast destruction on the infrastructure of Lebanese economic and social life. They have killed hundreds of civilians.

The difference between the deliberate slaughter of civilians, the trade-mark of all the clerical-fascist organisations, and “collateral” civilian casualties in a military operation is blurred by Israel’s recklessness and indifference to civilian casualties.

The fact that Hizbollah (and Hamas) deliberately site the rocket-launching bases, from which they bomb Israeli civilians, amidst dense civilian populations cannot justify Israel, acting from immense military strength, in saying, “so be it, the responsibility for the slaughter of civilians is theirs”. The responsibility is also Israel’s.

It is not at all certain that the conflict won’t escalate to draw Iran or Syria, or both, into its bloody remit.

Israel has a right to defend itself from those like Hizbollah whose stated political and military objective is to wipe out the Jewish nation? Yes, of course it has. It does not follow that Israel is right in this avoidable war (which has in it elements of a proxy war, Israel for the USA, Hizbollah for Iran).

Israel’s case for war is as follows:

Hizbollah attacked Israel and killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Hizbollah is a clerical-fascist political and military organisation, intent on establishing theocratic-military dictatorships throughout the Middle East and committed to the destruction of the Jewish nation.

Hizbollah is backed, financed and armed by Iran, whose President recently avowed his intention to destroy Israel (and which is trying to arm itself with nuclear weapons). Israel has a right to seize a favourable time to inflict maximum damage on formidable, implacable enemies

If Israel wipes out the clerical-fascist army-party, Hizbollah, then socialists — and in the first place Lebanese and other Arab socialists, feminists, secularists, advocates of gay rights, etc — and serious liberals would have cause to rejoice.

The case against Israel rests on what it is doing to Lebanon to “get at” Hizbollah, which has mass support in southern Lebanon. Hizbollah, will come out of this war as (the far less reactionary) Gamal Abdel Nasser came out of the Suez affair, when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt in 1956, strengthened in prestige and political authority.

Israel is not quelling but throwing petrol on the fires of Islamic political outrage and upsurge. This war will increase, not staunch, the flow of recruits and money to Hizbollah and other clerical-fascist political organisations.

And Israel’s actions in Lebanon cannot be separated from its overall policy and political goals — the annexation of a large part of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank territory.

Israel intends to impose its own, “unilateral settlement” and draw the “final” borders between Israel and the Palestinian-majority territory outside the Great Wall of Israel, which will define and guard its borders.

Intent on preventing the emergence of an independent Palestinian state, it is doing terrible things to the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank.

For these reasons, Israel must be condemned even by people who recognise that it has a right to exist and defend itself, by war where necessary.

The Israeli government argues that, because there are no strong Palestinian “partners for peace”, then it must act unilaterally. That would be more convincing and carry more moral authority if Israel had not, again and again, acted to undermine possible political partners for peace amongst the Palestinians (by re-occupying the West Bank in 2002, for instance).

Suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that there is no “partner for peace” with which Israel can deal politically to work out a multilateral agreement. In that case, then one of two things.

Either: Israeli will use its own great strength and its present relationship with the world super-power, judiciously, justly, benignly and with an eye to creating the conditions for an agreed, a multilateral, settlement as soon as possible;

Or: it will act unjustly, chauvinistically, out of a narrow national egotism that can only stimulate narrow national egotism and Islamic sectarianism on the other side.

If Israel were to pursue a truly benign, truly democratic policy — even unilaterally in so far as it could be done unilaterally — it would over time cut much — by no means all, but nonetheless, much — of the ground from under the feet of Arab and Islamist clerical fascism.

As things are, Israel must be condemned not only for the brutal inhumanity of what it is doing in Lebanon — fundamentally, because of its overall policy of which the war in Lebanon is a part.

Israel does not have the right to stifle and destroy the Palestinian nation as a political entity — and that is what is involved here — any more that the Palestinians and the Arab and Islamic states have the right to destroy Israel.

Two states for the two peoples in Israel Palestine!

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