The following was written by an activist in Haifa: he was interrupted twice by air raids while he wrote it:

The meaning of the Second Lebanese War

Even some bourgeois analysts are baffled by what they term the “overreaction” or “exaggerated response” of Israel, with the full backing of American imperialism, to the killing and kidnapping of a few soldiers. However, there’s a clear logic in the sanguinary Zionist madness. Israel, with a colonialist Jewish population of little more than 5 million people, faces 300 million Arabs and many hundred million more Muslims in the region, e.g. Iran. The Zionist Apartheid regime can therefore survive only by imposing what is, in the full sense of the word, a regime of terror over the peoples of the Middle East. That’s why the militarily insignificant guerrilla operations of Hamas and Hizballah in the Southern and Northern borders of Israel have a huge political significance, since they threaten to smash the myth of the invincibility of the Israel Defense Forces, the main prop (short of direct military intervention) of imperialism in the region. Hence the bestiality of the Israeli reaction to Hizballah’s act of solidarity with the Palestinians, which took place against the background of a Zionist killing spree in the Gaza strip and the West Bank that left more than 100 Palestinians dead and goes on unabated while the headlines are being occupied by the events in the North.

The implications go much further even than the perspective of a potential dismantling of the Zionist Apartheid regime in Palestine and the fall of client Arab regimes in the Middle East. The oppression of the peoples of the Third World, amounting to more than 90% of humanity, by a handful of imperialist states is only possible because of their disunity and military intimidation. In other words, the dominance of imperialism—above all, of course, by the United States—is in the last instance also based on imposing a regime of terror over the semi-colonial masses of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Taken the widest historical view, therefore, what is at stake is the survival of the present system of exploitation, of world capitalism. That’s why the G-8 rushed to the defense of Israel and the US has gone beyond declarations of solidarity to speed up the delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel. That’s also the reason why Israel, with full US backing, rejected several cease-fire offers from Lebanon and Iran. Zionism and Imperialism wanted war, and they are getting it with a vengeance.

The plans of Zionism and Imperialism

Already once, in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, in an operation planned and being carried out in full coordination with the US. The aim of the operation was to reach Beirut¸ wipe out the Palestinian guerrillas operating in the country, and install a Quisling dictator. The first Lebanese war of 1975-1990 left 120,000 dead and 300,000 wounded out of a total population of 3 million—and paved the way for the rising of a non-secular force, Hizballah, as the dominant anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist force in the region.

In this case also, the aim of Zionism and imperialism was to install a puppet regime in Lebanon. The code name for this operation was “the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolution 1559,” which calls for the disarming of Hezbollah and the deployment of the Lebanese Army throughout southern Lebanon. The groundwork for this aggression was laid by Rafiq al-Hariri in 2004, when he worked with the US and France to pass that resolution in the Security Council. The plan had the full support of Israel and client Arab regimes of the US: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt.

But who will be able to disarm Hizballah and assure that it will remain defenseless? Certainly not the insignificant Lebanese army, which didn’t even try to defend the country from the Israeli attacks and in whose ranks are to be found many Shiites, the denomination which provide the social base for Hizballah. Israel repeatedly stated its opposition to the deployment of even an “international” (i.e. imperialist) force in Lebanon and said that it will not agree to the presence of any troops in south Lebanon save for the Lebanese army. In other words: Israel wanted the resulting agreement to be the installation of a puppet regime under direct Zionist/American control, fearing that even an international force would make it more difficult for the IDF to terrorize the civilian population and implement the Zionist plans for the country.

The Failure of the “Yugoslav model”

At the beginning of the second Lebanese war, the military analysts in Israel wanted to believe that it would be “a second Kosovo war,” i.e. a war that would be won quickly through mass bombings by aerial forces alone. Without going into the moral perversity of people who take as a model the low-intensity nuclear warfare waged by NATO against Yugoslavia, which was littered with corpses and depleted uranium, it is clear that this “successful” precedent is irrelevant for the current war. After killing more than 300 civilians, completely destroying the Lebanese economic infrastructure and turning half a million people into refugees (the ethnic cleansing has already affected 20% of the Lebanese population, and now Israel has distributed leaflets calling for residents of the south to leaves their villages; if this happens en masse, the number may increase by another 100,000 or more), Zionism has achieved literally nothing: the combat ability of the Hizballah fighters remains intact and they are even able to launch coordinated missile attacks against all the Northern cities of Israel, encompassing one million inhabitants. The economic activity of the North is completely paralyzed and 25% of its inhabitants have already fled to Southern cities, creating a potentially serious refugee problem within Israel itself.

The failure of the original Zionist strategy has led the Israeli government to call up thousands of soldiers of the reserve and attempt a full-scale invasion of the country by ground troops. The implications of such a move are clear: Northern Command Chief Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam stated explicitly that Israelis should “stop counting the dead,” adding for good measure that “civilians will be killed too.” But for all the bombast and macho-talk, the unusually high casualties ratio of the ground warfare with Hizballah (almost 1:1, whereas in the territories there are usually dozens of Palestinian fighters for every soldier killed) is a serious worry for the Israeli military and government, which are not at all sure that the Israeli population will be willing to back such bloodletting for long. To repeat what we already said in the previous declaration of the CRCI: “What the Zionists didn’t count upon—used as they were to kill basically defenseless Palestinian guerrillas—is that this time they were facing an organization which was armed during the last decade by Iran, and which therefore was able to retaliate to the Israeli attacks, however disproportionate the military forces.”

Lebanon: The Zionist Vietnam

The three Israeli TV channels are actually a single propaganda outlet of the army, but even in that dunghill one can dig up interesting information. For instance, the Israeli general how boasted that Israel had driven Lebanon back 50 years—much like US Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay, who during the Vietnam War said: “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.” (General Curtis E. LeMay, Mission with LeMay: My Story, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1965, p. 565.)

In the same vein, the Israeli military correspondents report that the Israeli forces are facing a tough guerrilla resistance hiding in bunkers and caves “like the Americans in Vietnam.” Again, they don’t see any moral problem with the analogy, since, paraphrasing Terence, they all feel that nothing imperialist is alien to them. Let us recall that anything between two and three million Vietnamese and 56,000 to 60,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during the years 1963-1975 (an additional 500,000 Vietnamese and 75,000 French had been killed in 1945-1954) and that the tonnage of bombs dropped by the US on North Vietnam exceeded that in all the theaters during World War II.

But perhaps the most grotesque character was the military analyst who explained why the fighting was so hard: “We mustn’t forget that we are facing a terrorist organization with a yearly budget of 100 million dollars”—which is quite embarrassing considering that Israel gets 30 times that sum yearly from the US, not counting the huge local military budget, estimated at $9.45 billion by the CIA in 2005.

In sum, several thousand determined guerrilla fighters, with a small military budget and a modest supply of weapons from a Third World country (Iran, and perhaps, Syria as well) are beating a monstrous military apparatus built up by imperialism for decades. It’s Vietnam all over again—terrible suffering for the Lebanese people and also, to a much lesser degree, for the Israeli civilians, but good news for the anti-imperialist fighters all over the world.