Hands off Lebanon – arms embargo now

By:

Sid Lacombe

September 24, 2024

The Israeli bombings in Lebanon over the past 2 days have now killed more than 550 people. This increases the death toll in the country to more than 1000 over the past week. This includes the indiscriminate pager attacks that killed civilians, children and medical workers as well as mass bombing campaigns in the south and east of the country. These are war crimes that must be opposed.

The Israelis call this new aggression an “escalation to de-escalate” which is an Orwellian turn of phrase akin to “war is peace”. Yet the US administration has agreed with this formula as have many in the western media. US President Joe Biden says he is arguing against an expanded regional war but has not condemned the Israeli aggression nor have they limited weapons being sent to Israel.

This long-expected expansion is partly about Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to save his political career by appeasing the far-right that props up his government. It is also about using the particular moment — amid the chaos of the Gaza genocide — to expand Israel’s territory in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

For Israel, Lebanon has always been a target. They want to both eliminate any communities of Palestinian refugees that live there because they fear those descendants can delegitimize zionist control over the area. That was behind previous invasions in 1982 and 2006 and the massacres they conducted from Sabra and Shatila to Qana.

But for Netanyahu these attacks are also about burying the humiliating defeat the IOF suffered at the hands of the Lebanese resistance in 2006.

The Israelis have not yet indicated if they plan to launch a ground invasion this time but they would be in for a serious fight that they may lose.

Gaza Genocide

These attacks are following on almost a year of genocide in Gaza. Each day there are fresh massacres of civilians and an escalating health crisis and famine. Official reports put the death toll in Gaza at more than 40,000 people including 15,000 children but even those horrific numbers are a likely underestimate.

A recent report from the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet has revealed that the death toll in Gaza may be much higher than previously estimated.

The Lancet has done studies like this before. For example, they released a comprehensive report investigating the numbers of dead in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003.

They count not just the people who have been killed by direct fire but also those who die because of lack of medical treatment or by disease caused by the conditions of the war.

They estimate that as many as 186,000 Palestinians, or eight percent of the population, may have been killed.

Meanwhile Western governments and the corporate media continue to gaslight people with stories of a fictitious ceasefire deal. They complain that Hamas has not agreed to a deal but fail to mention that the Israeli state has publicly said that they will not support any deal that forces them to abandon their genocide. So essentially the Israelis will only support a deal if there is no ceasefire.

This is a pattern that we have seen for decades. Endless negotiations are used to buy time for the Israelis to continue killing Palestinians and seizing more land which moves the goalposts sufficiently so as to require a new set of negotiating terms.

Imperialism

The Israeli state exists to support the needs of the major Western Imperial powers. From its origins under the auspices of the UK government to recent support from the US, Israel can be relied upon to be the outpost of the Imperialists in the Middle East. As Biden himself said, “If Israel didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

An editorial in Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1952 summarized what Israel means to Imperialism:

“Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive Policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reasons the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.”

This is behind the foot-dragging on the question of the ceasefire deal and the reason why the US will never truly challenge the Israelis’ conduct even as it expands its attacks to Iran and Lebanon.

This is why none of the Western Imperial states will condemn Israel’s attempt to expand the war throughout the region.

It is the movements on the ground in both the major Imperialist states and the resistance in the region that will end the horror.

The Gaza genocide and broader conduct of Israel is a central fault-line in our world today and is reshaping political consciousness on a mass scale. The direction of the struggle will have repercussions for decades to come.

Canada

The Canadian government is in lockstep with the US and the other Western Imperialists. For the movement in Canada that means we must continue to focus our opposition on Trudeau’s support for the Zionist state.

The NDP is trying to pressure Trudeau and has called for recognition of the Palestinian state, sanctions on the Netanyahu government and an immediate arms embargo in wake of the Lebanon attacks.

This is a good start and is worthy of support. Any time we can push a government to end its blanket support for Israel and further isolate the state, that is a positive step.

But there will never be peace in the region while the Israeli state exists. It’s an ethno-nationalist project that needs to be dismantled.

That means that our movement is stabbing at the very heart of Western Imperialism and should be perepared for even greater blowback from the billionaires who profit off of the advantages that come with that brutality.

To be fully rid of the zionist entity, we need to dismantle the capitalist system where a tiny minority benefits from these horrors if we are ever to stop them altogether.

This will require deepening our movement in workplaces, and among community and activist groups.

Israel’s aggression is a sign of its weakness and the relative decline of US power globally. We in Canada have a specific role to play to further weaken that Western bloc. We need to both call for an arms embargo today and build towards the end of capitalism — a system that means endless war.

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Gaza