Brian Kelly examines the likely fallout from Israel’s escalating assault on Lebanon and argues for a renewed focus on anti-imperialism as the basis for reviving a mass anti-war movement.
The Israeli military’s assassination of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and its ongoing attacks across southern Lebanon make it almost certain that the region is in for a wider, potentially calamitous war. Even before its punitive airstrikes on Shi’a neighbourhoods in Beirut, Israel had killed nearly a thousand people across southern Lebanon—nearly 600 on a single day [23 September] in what one Lebanese journalist declared the “deadliest day in memory in [the decades-long] Lebanon-Israel conflict.”
The corporate media’s fawning obsession with the IDF’s technological prowess in weaponizing pagers and its tendency to regurgitate IDF talking points about ‘precision strikes’ has obscured the fact that its opening salvo has been directed overwhelmingly against civilians, in what is clearly a campaign aimed at terrorising the Lebanese people. Even the IDF admitted that its strikes against supposed Hezbollah ‘munitions stores’ in the Bekaa Valley were targeted mainly at civilian homes, releasing farcical illustrations purporting to show guided missiles hidden in cellars, reminiscent of photoshopped attempts to prove the existence of a Hamas ‘command centre’ under Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital. We now know that the so-called ‘precision strike’ that took out Nasrallah consisted of ‘up to 80 2,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs’ that ‘levelled’ an ‘entire residential block’.
In the wake of these attacks there can be little doubt that a wider war is the clear intention of the Netanyahu government. As one former Israeli general put it, “You don’t do something like that, hit thousands of people, and think war is not coming.” Influential elements on the Zionist Right have been angling since well before October 7th 2023 to expand military action beyond the borders of historic Palestine and, in their dream scenario, to ‘lure the US into a war with Iran’. Although there is obviously support for this among sympathetic elements guiding US foreign policy in the region (including a powerful Zionist lobby), until now cooler heads have prevailed, mindful of the colossal risk involved in lighting a torch to the entire region.
But the Biden administration’s persistent indifference to the scale of suffering in Gaza—and the calculation by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and others that they can give Netanyahu all he wants without fatal risk to their relations with corrupt Arab regimes in Egypt, Saudia Arabia and the UAE—has now made the Armageddon scenario more likely. Handwringing and diplomatic bluff aside, the US State Department has given the green light to the most extreme aims of the Zionist Right, who openly proclaim their determination to extend the horrors visited upon Gaza to the whole of the region. “What we can do in Gaza, we can do in Beirut,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has boasted.
Lebanon in the Crosshairs
While the US administration talks a great deal about the threat posed by ‘Iran’s proxies’ in the region, Hezbollah is widely seen across the Middle East as the only force capable of inflicting serious losses on the IDF. Born out of the vacuum in armed resistance left after Israel’s 1982 invasion and the forced exile of some 15,000 Palestinian fighters, Hezbollah managed to punish the IDF in the 34-day 2006 war. Despite discontent connected with their reactionary role in Syria and their complicity in growing economic inequality, Hezbollah retain a mass following among the Shi’a population concentrated in the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, and have forged alliances with elements among the country’s Sunni and Druze populations. They are major players in a parliamentary system that reflects the sectarian divisions which continue to shape Lebanon.
In the years since the 2006 war, Hezbollah have reportedly acquired advanced long-range missiles, and their armed ranks include thousands of battle-hardened cadre who saw long service in Syria propping up the brutal Assad regime. While there can be little doubt that the Israeli military have inflicted a series of humiliating early blows against the organisation, it is difficult to gauge what impact these will have if Israel decides to go ahead with a ground invasion. As one sober BBC analyst put it, ‘Israel’s earlier wars with Hezbollah were grinding, attritional and never produced a decisive victory for either side. This one might go the same way, however satisfying the last week of offensive action has been for Israel’.
Here the political calculus is more important than the military. Despite their public declaration of support for Palestinians facing genocide, it is obvious even to US security establishment that neither Hezbollah nor Iran have been keen on all-out war. The Israelis have gone out of their way to provoke them, with a lethal strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus in April, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at the end of July in Tehran, and now the assassination of Nasrallah and a string of prominent commanders in Lebanon.
Despite this, every serious observer of Iran’s operations—including those close to the regime—considers it extremely unlikely they will enter the war: the New Arab gauges the odds of Iran entering the war as ‘very low or zero’, quoting its former ambassador to Jordan as stating that ‘if Iran intended to do so, it would have acted much earlier’. Others say the same about Hezbollah, though obviously it may now be pushed into action it hoped to avoid under Nasrallah. One serious factor constraining Tehran is widespread popular discontent, especially among young people: this means that it ‘cannot rally society to engage in a new war’ as it did in the 1980s.
In launching a wave of terror attacks, Israel aims to demoralize Hezbollah’s base among the Shi’a and exacerbate sectarian tensions inside Lebanon so that ordinary people blame them—and not the Israelis—for the carnage to come. The results so far are contradictory. The depth of solidarity felt across Lebanon for Palestinians living under US and Israeli bombs in Gaza should not be underestimated. As Mohammed Mhawish writes in +972 Magazine:
For the people of Lebanon, Gaza is not a distant cause; it is a mirror of their own suffering. They understand too well the feeling of being abandoned by the world, the endless waiting for help that never comes. They know the pain of watching their children grow up under the shadow of war, of raising a family in the ruins of what once was. And even now, with bombs exploding around them, they stand with us, just as they always have.
There is evidence that, despite deep misgivings about its direction in Lebanese politics, Hezbollah’s popularity has grown over the past year—including among Sunnis who support its intervention for Gaza—but this sits uneasily alongside widespread weariness over the severity of economic crisis and discontent over the party’s role in imposing austerity: one left-wing critic characterizes them as the ‘main guardian of the corrupt, sectarian status quo in Lebanon today’. Anger over Israeli aggression therefore co-exists alongside deep anxiety over social and economic instability. ‘Even as the Lebanese have displayed solidarity in the face of Israeli actions,’ one observer has noted, ‘there is simmering anger that Lebanon is again being dragged into a war in which most people in the country want no part’.
Tarek Abou Jaoude has written that while ‘[t]he majority of Lebanese citizens have been consistent since October 2023 that they have no appetite for a war’, this ‘latest attack could change things’. It is difficult to predict whether, as the IDF hope, the prospect of war will create problems for Hezbollah among its own base, or instead galvanise popular sentiment behind them. While many civilians are understandably fleeing the south—even across the border into Syria—in the short term the IDF’s airstrikes seem to have deepened the anger of ordinary Lebanese and strengthened popular support for the resistance.
Need to Transform the Solidarity Movement
The very real spectre of regional war means that the magnificent global solidarity movement that has sprung up in support of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank must now recalibrate, and transform itself into a mass movement that understands the deep connection between the ongoing genocide in Palestine and US imperialism’s strategic imperative to extend its domination of the whole of the Middle East. Until now the movement has been built in large part on widespread revulsion at the scale of barbarism being meted out in Gaza, and on veneration of Palestinian cultures of resistance, which have persevered through unimaginable horrors. That will not be enough to prevent the carnage in Lebanon, or beyond in Iran.
It has become increasingly common to hear speakers on demonstrations insist that the movement should have ‘nothing to do with politics’—and that plain humanitarianism and sympathy for civilians caught in the crossfire is the only sound basis for growing the movement. This is mistaken: the prospect now of regional war that spreads well beyond the borders of historic Palestine means that the very opposite is the case. Activists need to build toward confronting the deeply entrenched power that has green-lit the genocide.
We need a movement that situates the brutal occupation of Palestine within the wider context of imperialist strategy across the Middle East and North Africa, which can tangibly explain the connection between the horrors the system doles out in Gaza and the sharp inequality and increasing militarism destroying our own societies, and which taps into the power working people can bring to bear to bring this unspeakable barbarism to an end. Excluding ‘politics’ means holding back the movement from moving in a radical and anti-capitalist direction and settling for what our rulers are willing to concede. And Palestinian liberation is not on offer from any of them.
Arab Rulers’ Complicity and Imperialist Domination of the Middle East
How would an anti-imperialist politics help to transform the solidarity movement? For one it would move us beyond guesswork about whether the spectacular cynicism at the heart of US policy since October 7th is rooted in the special incompetence of a senile, bumbling idiot president or in something more fundamental to the regional (and global) imperatives of American (and indeed EU and UK) capitalism. Activists are not wrong to point to the power of the Zionist lobby or the weapons industry in the US as important factors, but if Israeli actions did not complement US strategic priorities in the Middle East the White House would not be slow in bringing the hammer down.
The Biden administration’s strategic aims have been clear from the first days of the current onslaught. The US has expended massive diplomatic and military resources enabling genocide in Gaza and obstructing any attempts by the UN General Assembly, the ICJ and others to censure Israel or bring a halt to the most barbaric deployment of military force in recent history. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has worked overtime—not in pursuing a ceasefire, not in securing humanitarian aid, not even in securing the release of Israeli hostages—but in keeping the Arab regimes on board the project of ‘normalisation’ with Israel hatched under the Trump regime and now fully embraced by Biden, Kamala Harris and the whole US foreign policy establishment.
This explains Biden’s complete about-face in his approach to the Arab dictatorships. The overnight reversal of his pledge to shun Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman after revelations that the crown prince orchestrated an operation that saw journalist Jamal Kashoggi chopped to pieces and carried off in diplomatic pouches from the Saudi’s Turkish consulate is the most glaring of these. The designation just last month of the UAE as a ‘major defense partner’, Biden’s approval just a week earlier of a $1.3b arms package to the al-Sisi dictatorship in Egypt—which saw Blinken lift requirements that conditioned military aid on upholding human rights—all of these demonstrate plainly how little democracy matters to the American ruling class in its ‘day after’ plans for the region.
It is a common mistake to assume that US power in the region rests solely on Israeli military capacity. The Zionist state performs a key function in punishing any attempts to upset the US-dominated status quo, but even without a formal ‘normalisation’ pact, it has always done so in conjunction with the reactionary Arab regimes, who themselves rule over hugely unequal, corrupt societies with an iron fist. Given the strength of sympathy for Palestine among the Arab masses and the deep wells of discontent among workers and the oppressed across the Middle East and North Africa, any move in the direction of substantive democracy would pose a direct threat to the whole edifice of US domination of the region.
It is the weakness and lack of popular support for these regimes among their own people that explains their frantic bid to acquire the most advanced repressive technology: in this respect they share common interests with the heavily-militarised Zionist state. But their unpopularity points also to the Arab regimes’ extreme vulnerabilities, which we saw on display briefly during the revolutions that swept across the Middle East and North Africa after 2011. For all the heroism demonstrated by the Palestinian armed resistance in the face of overwhelming military force since October 7th, the Zionist state and its Western backers cannot be defeated through armed struggle alone. The potential to win full Palestinian liberation resides elsewhere, among the Arab masses, who have a stake in challenging their own rulers, and who in sweeping them from power can bring down the imperialist system that speaks out of one side of its mouth about ‘democratic values’ and a ‘rules-based international order’, but which has applied its full resources to overseeing genocide.
Moving Beyond Despair, Building Bigger and Deeper
The relentlessness of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza—now extended to the West Bank, and onward into Lebanon and who knows where else—has understandably generated pessimism in the ranks of the global solidarity movement about our ability to stop the slaughter. Across the ‘democratic’ west, our rulers have devoted enormous resources to cutting down democratic rights and criminalising solidarity with Palestine. All of this can take a toll on activists. But the despair is unwarranted: the national march planned for Dublin on the 5th October is likely to be the largest mobilisation for Palestine in Irish history.
The question is ‘where do we go from here?’ In almost every corner of the globe—including in Ireland—there are real prospects for building an even bigger movement on the streets, in communities and workplaces. Impressive as our street mobilisations have been, the depth of popular anger over the brutality being carried out by Zionism is not yet reflected in numbers on the marches, or in grassroots action being undertaken in workplaces and communities. Among secondary-level and university students solidarity with Palestine runs deep, but there has been almost no attempt north or south to mobilise them or provide them with the tools for organising themselves. The labour movement in Ireland has barely entered the fray—among some in the upper levels of the trade union bureaucracy there are fine speeches and a sprinkling of attendance on marches, but no sense of urgency about making workplace actions bite, or building on some of the impressive initiatives around BDS at work that we’ve already seen.
We need a movement that is ambitious about the possibilities for bringing tens of thousands more into ongoing solidarity work; a movement grounded in anti-imperialist politics, and one that can match its words with action; a movement that won’t shy away from calling out those in our governments north and south who talk a good talk but who are in the end complicit with genocide. North and south we need to move on quickly from the turnout on 5 October to reinvigorate a movement that understands the stakes involved in the Middle East, and which sees the liberation of Palestine inextricably linked with our own freedom.
