Stop the spread of Israel’s genocidal war into Lebanon!

By Kevin B. Anderson

Published 1 October, 2024

First published at IMHO Journal.

With the seeming acquiescence of the US, Israel launched the most dangerous and reckless escalation yet in its war against Palestinians and Arabs. On Friday, September 27, just hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a bellicose speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Israel launched a bomb and missile attack in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon, killing most of the top leadership of Hezbollah, the large and well-organized Shia Muslim militia. Among the dead was Hassan Nasrallah, its leader and the most powerful political leader in Lebanon.

In this attack and in a series of others that included the bizarre booby-trapping of thousands of electronic pagers that wounded hundreds of rank-and-file Hezbollah members, their families, and bystanders, the State of Israel has widened its genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza. There, Israel has slain 41,000 people, mainly civilians, over the past year, and has also carried out severe repression on the West Bank.

In his September 27 UN speech, Netanyahu virtually declared war on the entire region, including Iran a thousand miles (1500 km) away: “There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach and that is true of the entire Middle East.” In the next hours, as the attack was underway, apparent US complicity stuck out like a sore thumb despite pro forma denials. As the US’s most authoritative newspaper reported with a wink and a nod: “The American secretary of defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, was on the phone with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, while Israel was carrying out the strike, according to a Pentagon spokeswoman, Sabrina Singh. But she said the United States had ‘no involvement in this operation and did not have advanced warning’” (Ronen Bergman et al., “Israel Bombs Residential Site in Effort to Kill Hezbollah Leader,” New York Times, September 28, 2024). To put the icing on the cake in terms of US complicity, President Joe Biden declared that the assassination of Nasrallah amounted to “a measure of justice.”

As these lines are being written, Israel has begun intense air attacks on Houthi-controlled Yemen, and is threatening a ground invasion of Lebanon, or at the very least, turning Lebanon into another Gaza via attacks from the air. While we cannot know the future, we can be sure that the devastation of Arab lives will continue unabated and over a wider terrain, while Western politicians will continue to declare their support for “Israel’s right to defend itself.”

What does the State of Israel intend or think it can accomplish by all this? To be sure, it has shown that, unlike last October 7, when they were utterly humiliated by a surprise attack by Hamas, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agencies, working with the US and others, are capable of staging devastating attacks against their enemies. Here, their clear technological superiority, as well as old-fashioned use of spies inside Hezbollah (for how else did they know the time and place the Hezbollah leadership was gathering?) has landed a severe blow against Hezbollah’s leadership. They have also been able, so far, to block most counterattacks from the air by Hezbollah.

But what, even in colonialist terms, is the use to the State of Israel and its allies of such a tactical victory, short of sheer revenge for a series of pin-prick attacks across the Lebanon border and bellicose declarations by Hezbollah? Will it serve for long as a morale booster at a time when the stalemate in Gaza is approaching its one-year anniversary without any significant rescue of hostages despite the resort to genocide against the population?

Is the State of Israel under the illusion that it can, even if the US were to allow it the attempt, be able to “eradicate” its enemies in Lebanon along with those in Gaza? The entire State of Israel, not the Netanyahu government is the correct appellation here, because Netanyahu’s “moderate” opponents were among those who have been calling on him to “put a stop” to the minor Hezbollah attacks on the northern border. Back in August, the “moderate” opposition politician and former general Benny Gantz actually attacked Netanyahu’s neofascist government for not being aggressive enough on the Lebanon border: “We must keep up the advantage of the initiative that was taken and increase the political and military pressure to push Hezbollah away, to return northern residents to their homes safely” (Jonathan Borger, “Netanyahu faces Israeli calls for broader strikes against Hezbollah,” The Guardian, August 26, 2024). And regarding the assassination from the air of Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership, the Israeli public seems solidly behind the operation, considering it a major victory.

The tactically successful Beirut assassinations will buy Netanyahu time with his own public and with the US and European powers, allowing him to look like a winner, something all rulers admire. In the next months, will nuclear-armed Israel go further? Will it implement Netanyahu’s threat in his UN speech to wage war from Gaza to Tehran to “eradicate” its enemies? Will it try to go that far rather than negotiate an end to its occupation of Palestine? Will the US go along?

Israel’s grand illusion, shared by the US/UK/EU and by the Arab monarchs and dictators of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., that the Palestinian cause had been put onto the back burner if not virtually eliminated, was shattered by the massive Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Is that illusion returning, albeit in a more violent form via the plan to “eradicate” perceived enemies of Israel?

Possibly. But what is certain from the September 27 assassination of the Hezbollah leadership is that another type of illusion has also been undermined, if not shattered. Iran, Hezbollah, and their allies opposed most of the mass democratic Arab revolutions of 2011, and even participated in the untold brutality of the repression of the Syrian revolution by the semi-military Assad regime. For a time, this led one of their close allies, Hamas, to move away from what became their Axis to Resistance. In their propaganda, when they weren’t denouncing the Arab revolutionaries as dupes of imperialism, Iran and Hezbollah claimed that the ultimate defeat of the spontaneous, horizontalist Arab uprisings of 2011 took place because they were not an effective means of organizing resistance. They said this despite the fact that the 2011 uprisings actually overthrew two governments, in Tunisia and Egypt, and began for a while to develop political revolutions in those countries. This does not mean we shouldn’t critique – as revolutionary Marxists rather than Islamists — these movements and their one-sided faith in spontaneism, but tighter organization and better theoretical grounding do not have to mean a hierarchical/vanguardist model either.

Especially after the defeat of all of the Arab revolutions, those like Hezbollah claimed that their own hierarchical, secretive, militaristic, and authoritarian form of organization was better equipped to fight effectively against such powerful enemies as imperialism and Israeli occupation. Hamas claimed something similar. Hezbollah’s big tactical defeat on September 27, 2024 shows that these hierarchical/authoritarian forms of organization and theocratic politics are simply not as viable as they claim, not only because the rightwing politics of these theocratic movements offer no real liberation for the masses, but also because defeating something as powerful as the Israeli occupiers will require mass involvement and initiative, including a politics that appeals to a section of the Israeli Jewish working class and progressive intellectuals. Looking back, one could also note that of all the Palestinian armed and/or mass democratic movements of the past forty years, the only one that achieved even a limited victory was the mass, mainly nonviolent Intifada of 1987-88 in the Palestinian territories.

In this sense, truly opposing Israel’s genocidal wars requires not only determined, mass action in the region and across the world, but also a rethinking of our basic premises if we are to move from protest to victory. Part of that rethinking will have to involve more discussion of our goals as well as what we oppose, as well as the means of achieving these goals.

One thing we need to consider is the need for consistency in opposing occupation and genocide, not acting as if regimes outside the US/UK/EU sphere are not also carrying out such crimes. Think of China and the Uyghurs or Burma/Myanmar’s repression of a democratic revolution. Or Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s genocidal occupation.

Such discussions need to take place amid the theory/practice framework that has been the hallmark of serious Marxist movements for more than a century. These discussions need to occur not just in reading groups or radical conferences, as important as they are, but also amid the din and fury of the struggle itself. They are not a distraction, but the very fiber that holds real liberation movements together.

But as we are doing so, we need above all, and immediately to take to the streets, the campuses, and the workplaces to demand an end to this genocidal war and to its funding and support from the US/UK/EU.

Stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza!

Stop Israel’s attacks on the West Bank!

Stop Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Yemen and the threats against Iran!

End military and economic aid to Israel!

Occupation is a crime, from Ukraine to Palestine!

Support genuinely revolutionary and liberationist movements around the world!

Approved as a Statement of the Steering Committee of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).