The Socialist (July 06) - Feature: Middle East crisis escalates

Note: Since this issue of The Socialist went to press, the Israeli state has placed Lebanon under siege and launched devastating airstrikes, ostensibly in repsonse to the kidnap of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas. Following this article we carry the latest analysis of the escalating crisis from Socialist World.

The Gaza strip is again suffering a brutal Israeli army onslaught, with massive shell bombardment. Vital bridges have been blown up and Gaza’s only power station hit by nine missiles, which cut electricity supply to 65% of Gaza and prevented water supply pumps from working.

As well as these attacks from the sea and air, Gaza was completely sealed off by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Despite its declared withdrawal from Gaza one year ago, Israel has now moved ground troops back to parts of the strip.

The Israeli forces also imprisoned 64 Hamas activists and ministers, including the finance minister, shelled the office of the Hamas prime minister and stripped four Hamas officials of their Jerusalem residency permits.

All this was the Israeli government’s initial response to Palestinian militias taking prisoner an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. This in turn was a reaction to the IDF killing of the leader of the Palestinian Resistance Committees (PRC), Jamal Abu Samadhana, and the killing of many other Palestinians in recent weeks.

Thousands of high-tech IDF missiles have bombarded the Gaza strip during the last few months. All the leading Palestinian militia leaders and many from their political wings are on the IDF target list, including when the timing is decided, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and the Hamas leader living in Syria, Mashaal. Many civilians are dying as well, unable to escape shells raining down on such a densely populated strip of land.

The death toll in June went over 25, ten of them being children. This toll included a particularly horrific incident on 9 June, when a twelve year old girl, Huda Ghalia, saw seven members of her family slaughtered by a missile on the Gaza beach where they were picnicking. Since the start of the second intifada in the year 2000, more than 3,920 Palestinians and 1,113 Israelis have died.

Gilad Shalit was taken hostage in a carefully planned assault by three Palestinian militias - the PRC, Islamic Army and the armed wing of Hamas - on an IDF post in Kerem Shalom near the Gaza strip. They had dug a tunnel under the Gaza border fence, and in the assault had killed two Israeli soldiers and destroyed two IDF vehicles as well as taking Shalit hostage.

In addition to IDF weaponry, Palestinians in the occupied territories have been enduring an economic blockade by Israel and the world capitalist powers since they elected Hamas to government in a landslide victory in January 2006. As well as the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of dollars of direct support from the US and EU, Israel has withheld the return of $60 million per month of tax revenues that it collects from the territories. Israeli banks and a monopoly fuel supplier have also withdrawn services.

The result of these measures is massively increased poverty, malnutrition and unemployment. A quarter of the Palestinian population relies directly on the wages of 165,000 Palestinian Authority (PA) employees who have not been fully paid since the sanctions began, and most Palestinians have already spent all their savings. The World Bank predicts that 67% will be in poverty – defined as living on less than $2 per day - in the territories by the end of 2006, though the situation could be even worse than that by then. Illustrating the humanitarian crisis, the World Food Programme recently said that many Palestinians are now living on only one meal a day.

Alarmed at the rapid deterioration, the international "quartet" that pronounces on Israel-Palestine affairs, which consists of the EU, US, Russia and the UN, agreed some limited emergency assistance in May to stave off complete collapse of the PA – via Fatah PA President Mahmood Abbas’s office. But the US-led quartet and the Israeli regime have no solution to the growing poverty and conflict, which their past actions have created and their future actions will only make worse.

Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement – was elected in a landslide victory in January 2006, due to widespread anger with Fatah, the dominant political group throughout the previous 39 years of Israeli occupation of the territories (Gaza and the West Bank). It was a vote against corruption, declining living standards and lack of advancement in the struggle against the occupation.

Palestinian infighting

The Hamas government was immediately vilified as a terrorist government by the Israeli regime and capitalist powers internationally. The real reason for giving the Palestinians collective punishment in the form of sanctions is Hamas’s history of adopting an uncompromising anti-Israeli stance, which brings it into conflict with the imperialist powers. Those same powers have long supported the Israeli capitalist state despite its use of brutal repression and terror against the Palestinians, and its rejection of UN resolutions against the occupation.

Hamas has pledged to enter into a long-term ceasefire if the occupation ends and unilaterally stuck to a ceasefire for 18 months, despite constant IDF provocations. However, the horrific slaughter of the Ghalia family on 9 June led them to resume firing home-made rockets into Israeli areas.

Following the election of Hamas, armed conflicts broke out between Fatah gunmen and those of Hamas, with the former being incensed at Fatah’s loss of political power and privileges. As many Fatah members are employed by the PA, the infighting has also stemmed from backlash over the non-payment of wages by the Hamas government. However, during May, Fatah leaders started to fear the extent of the violence and the seeming entry onto the scene of new, more uncompromising groups, possibly including some who take al-Qaeda as their role model. A number of Palestinians had been killed or injured in the clashes and the life of Abbas himself was threatened.

As a result of these pressures, and in an attempt to undermine Hamas and regain some initiative, Abbas quickly supported an 18-point proposal drawn up in May jointly by Fatah and Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails. He then told the Hamas government that if it didn’t sign up to the document too, it would be put to all Palestinians in the territories in a referendum on 26 July.

The 18-point plan calls for a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem its capital; the subordination of Hamas to the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO); the right of return of refugees; the release of prisoners; the right to resistance against the occupation; and the formation of a national unity government involving both Hamas and Fatah.

Confronted with this list, Hamas has not yet given a full verdict, but has acquiesced to acceptance of a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders, giving implicit recognition to Israel while not stating it explicitly. This is a significant change in Hamas’s position.

Palestinians would most likely vote for the proposals in a referendum if it goes ahead, though if the turnout is low it would undermine claims of success by Abbas. Nevertheless, Hamas is under pressure to agree the proposals and avoid a referendum because of the chance of a yes vote.

If a Fatah-Hamas deal is achieved, it could lead to an attempt at power-sharing in government, as a move by Fatah to regain some of its former prestige and by Hamas to try to alleviate economic sanctions and to avoid full responsibility for failing to advance the Palestinian struggle.

Hamas

However, Hamas is internally divided, with a hard-line wing that is critical of the more moderate wing, so any compromise with Fatah could lead to a split. Abbas has tried to benefit from Hamas’s problems, by supporting the prisoners’ demands and blaming Hamas for the international sanctions. The Palestinian people blame US Imperialism for the sanctions rather than Hamas, but nevertheless Abbas can play on the desperation caused by the effects of those sanctions.

Whether Hamas survives in government long enough to be party to a new power-sharing PA is not certain US sanctions are aimed at the removal of the Hamas regime, and it is also possible that the Israeli regime could decide to step up further its present campaign to remove the Hamas government. The removal of Hamas from government through the actions of US or Israeli capitalism however, as well as multiplying the anger of the Palestinians and their support for Hamas, would increase outrage worldwide, particularly among the Arab masses.

The escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict following the capture of Gilad Shalit may recede if a deal is struck, or could escalate considerably without one. In exchange for Shalit’s release, his captors are demanding an Israeli commitment to release around 1,000 Palestinian women, children and "humanitarian cases" from Israeli jails, out of 8,000 imprisoned Palestinians.

Whatever the outcome, the situation shows strongly the extreme instability of the region. With none of the Palestinians’ problems solved, and with their plight worsening, the danger constantly exists of a spiralling into an all-out war involving the surrounding Arab countries. There is already rising outrage among workers in surrounding countries at the Israeli siege of the 1.4 million Gazans.

Observing this, some capitalist commentators are expressing unease about what lies ahead. For example, the Financial Times warns in an editorial on the Israeli siege of Gaza: "this dark new episode is in danger of spiralling out of control. A decade of intensified Israeli action and political stalemate has radicalised Palestinians. This offensive will continue that – just as politics was staging a comeback. The response of the US and its allies, calling for ‘restraint’ is mutely inadequate".

However, neither the "comeback" politics of Hamas nor the pro-Western imperialism Fatah can show a way forward. A capitalist Palestinian state, whether Islamic or secular, would not solve the Palestinians’ economic problems. Many Hamas leaders are self-sacrificing, have rejected the corruption of Fatah and condemn US Imperialism. But once in power, whether in councils or government, they have turned to passing the burden of economic crisis onto the shoulders of workers through job cuts and privatisations, as has Fatah.

Neither does either party have a strategy or programme that can deliver a Palestinian state against the massively armed opposition of the Israeli ruling class. Fatah’s method of appealing to the world capitalist powers and corrupt Arab elites to exert pressure on Israel has proved to be futile, as the self-interest of these ruling classes will always come before Palestinian rights. Likewise Hamas’s previous resort to suicide bombings on Israeli civilians and armed attacks by small secretive militias has not taken the struggle for national liberation forward.

Only the building of a democratic, anti-capitalist, mass movement of Palestinian workers will be able to organise successful work for both defence and the furthering of the Palestinian struggle.

Israeli regime

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government has been shaken by the abduction of Gilad Shalit, the continued firing of Palestinian rockets from the Gaza strip into Israeli communities (despite there being few injuries from them) and support for Hamas from ordinary people across the Arab world. But Olmert has no other strategy than one that will exacerbate the situation further, this being a unilateral imposition of borders and separation of the Palestinian territories from Israel.

Following Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal last summer of the Gaza Jewish settlements and four in the West Bank, Olmert wants to remove most of the remaining isolated West Bank settlements that are to the East of the separation wall being built, containing around 70,000 settlers. Israel would then encompass 80% of the existing settlers – around 375,000 - in the three main West Bank settlement blocks and East Jerusalem. The Palestinians would be left with 11% of pre-1948 Palestine, in atomised parcels of land which would be little better than prison camps.

US President George Bush pays lip service against unilateralist separation by urging Olmert to negotiate it with PA President, Abbas. But Olmert, like Sharon before him, has in effect made it clear that he has no intention of entering into negotiations as it would lead to concessions he is unwilling to make.

Separation is the chosen pathway of the Israeli ruling class, mainly driven by demographic forecasts, which show that Palestinians will be the majority of the population in the land encompassed by Israel and the occupied areas within two decades. Israel was created as a Jewish state, and depends on having a Jewish majority to maintain this character.

However, Olmert’s party – Kadima – is a highly unstable political vehicle, as it has virtually no unifying ideology, set up in haste as it was by Sharon, as an escape route from the restrictions of the right-wing Likud party. Also unstable is the four-party coalition that Kadima governs through. This coalition could break up before Olmert can execute his plans.

And if the separation is eventually completed, it will not bring security to the Israeli people. The attack on the Israeli post at Kerem Shalom shows that fences can be overcome. And there are one million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who have no fences separating them from Jewish homes.

No capitalist solution

Just as the Israeli capitalist parties cannot offer security, neither can they bring decent living standards to Israeli workers. On the contrary, there have been waves of attacks on the welfare state and secure jobs by successive governments in pursuit of a neo-liberal agenda. So alongside a Palestinian struggle against capitalism, the Israeli working class also needs to build a new movement and party that can represent its own interests and challenge the capitalist system.

There is no prospect of resolving the national question in the region on a capitalist basis; the only way forward lies in Israeli workers and Palestinian workers taking matters into their own hands and building a working-class based alternative.

A determined struggle against capitalism will raise consciousness of the need for that alternative to be socialism, in both Israel and in a Palestinian state alongside it, in a socialist confederation of the Middle East. This will be the only basis on which the conflict and bloodshed can be ended once and for all and decent living standards provided for everyone.

Last night (12/07/06) the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) bombed the runway of Beirut International Airport, fired rockets at Hezbollah’s (the Lebanese Islamic Shiah organisation) headquarters and carried out over 30 other air raids on Lebanese targets.

They implemented a land, sea and air blockade of Lebanese territory. For the first time since May 2000, the Israeli army has re-entered Lebanese territory.

Workers and young people around the world have been sickened at the recent vicious IDF military attacks in Gaza which have left the majority of the population without electricity and running water. When the Israeli security forces arrested 64 Hamas leaders including many government ministers, the Bush regime was collectively struck dumb. And yet they did not stop speaking about the outrage of the capture, or "kidnapping" as they described it, of IDF soldiers. US imperialism has launched a huge propaganda campaign against the "terrorist" Hamas government but has not uttered any words of condemnation against the latest IDF invasion of Lebanon. Millions around the world will be absolutely horrified by these double standards.

The Israeli regime’s use of brutal military force has already claimed the lives of 50 Lebanese civilians. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) attacks were in response to a surprise military attack across the Lebanese border by Hezbollah. In the clashes which followed, eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two were captured by Hezbollah who took them back across the border. This was a big blow to the prestige of the Israeli regime. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, called this an "act of war" and threatened reprisals which would be "very, very, very painful". Six thousand reservists have been called up for army duty on Israel’s northern borders.The commander of Israel’s northern forces said that if the soldiers were not released immediately, then the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) would turn the clock back "twenty years in Lebanon" in terms of destruction of infrastructure. If the IDF continue and extend their invasion of Lebanon, then given the conditions that exist in the Middle East, this could light the fires of a much wider conflagration.

But this is only one flank of an already growing military conflict. On the same day as they bombed Lebanon, the IDF killed 23 Palestinians in their continuing campaign of massive collective military punishment against the Palestinian people. This campaign is ostensibly a response by the Israeli regime to the attack by Islamic militias on an Israeli army outpost and the taking prisoner of an Israeli soldier. IDF forces, after pulling out of Gaza in August of last year have now reoccupied the south, middle and north of the strip effectively splitting the territory in two. In one raid the IDF dropped a massive quarter of a tonne bomb on the house of a Hamas leader.

Tension and conflict already high in the region, is in danger of spiralling out of control. There is a cauldron of incandescent hatred bubbling amongst the masses of the Middle East towards the Israeli regime’s increasingly brutal oppression of the Palestinian masses which is seen as having carte blanche support from US imperialism. In addition, US imperialism’s barbaric military occupation of Iraq (to protect the oil supplies for energy hungry US capitalism) has brought the country to an open civil war.

As if this were not enough, the last decade has seen a massive stepping up of neoliberal attacks in the region. The Arab regimes are corrupt, undemocratic, and brutal and they are the willing agents of imperialist inspired, massive attacks on the living standards of the working class and poor peasantry in the region. All this and more means that the region is becoming increasingly unstable by the day. The possibility of armed conflict becoming an open regional war cannot now be ruled out.

The main reason for this is that increasingly there is very little room for manoeuvre for the imperialist powers and the corrupt Arab elites in the region. It seems to be the case that when faced with opposition to their policies, the imperialist powers and especially their proxy agents in the region respond by stepping up economic, and now increasingly military and repressive attacks on the masses. In reality, the Israeli ruling class has no fully worked out strategy and is simply reacting to events with brute force. This adds to the danger of a further escalation of the conflict.

But US imperialism’s strategy for maintaining control of the Middle East has been torn asunder over the last few years. Following the September 11 attacks, where the US hyper power appeared to temporarily have more room to intervene militarily around the world, the Bush regime put forward the idea that it would reshape the Middle East. They would sweep the Taliban out of Afghanistan and implement a "democratic secular regime". Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would be dealt with and a new stable US-friendly regime would flower in the Middle East and provide cheap energy for the West. A "democratic" transformation of the rest of the region would follow, sweeping aside the Iranian regime which was part of the "axis of evil", Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Ba’ath regime and maybe even replacing past allies of US imperialism with more compliant and stable rulers in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would result from the crushing of the most extreme Islamic groups in the Occupied Territories.

Imperialism's nightmare

This neo-con Utopia has been replaced with a horrific nightmare for imperialism (and for the masses) where ever it turns. Iraq is in a worse situation than when under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein. The possibility of the country breaking up into hostile unstable statelets is becoming greater by the day. Iran has been qualititatively strengthened regionally because Shiah parties linked to the regime are in the ascendancy in Iraq.

Moreover, the Iranian regime has refused to bow to Western pressure to end its production of enriched uranium gaining the support of the majority of the population for its anti-imperialist rhetoric. Saudi Arabia and Egypt face a growing threat from Al Qaeda-linked reactionary armed Islamic groups. In addition, the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood made significant gains in the last general election in Egypt. But the most graphic humiliation for US imperialism’s plans for the region came with the crushing landslide of Hamas in the Palestinian elections in January of this year.

But it is the latest incursion into Lebanon which could have serious consequences given the history of imperialist and Israeli capitalism’s intervention in the country. The IDF first invaded Lebanon in 1978, ostensibly in retaliation for a PLO attack in Israel. In reality, the right-wing Israeli government at the time, with Ariel Sharon as Defence Minister, wanted to smash the PLO in Lebanon and put in place a regime friendly to Israeli interests. Israeli capitalism’s intervention led to the formation of the Shiah Hezbollah movement which finally managed to drive the IDF out of southern Lebanon in ignominious defeat in 2000.

Given the greater military strength and cohesiveness of Hezbollah, the Israeli regime is going to have even greater difficulties in forcing Hezbollah to release captured Israeli soldiers than it did with Hamas in Gaza.

US imperialism also suffered big setbacks in Lebanon. In 1983, the US embassy was destroyed by Hezbollah and later that year a massive truck bomb killed 241 US service men forcing US troops to withdraw later in the year. Richard Armitage, who played a senior role in the US State department from 2001 – 2005, said recently that Hezbollah owed a "blood debt" to the US as a result.

Since the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon as a result of mass protests within Lebanon (and under the pressure, for their own different reasons, of US and French imperialism) there has been a growth in sectarian tension in Lebanon and increasing instability in the country and government. The Lebanese Prime Minister has distanced itself from Hezbollah’s actions, despite the fact that Hezbollah is part of the coalition government. This crisis could lead to the fall of the Lebanese regime, and, if instability leads to open clashes a re-entry of Syrian armed forces into the country, with all that entails.

Despite its overwhelming military power, the Israeli regime is also under huge pressure. Ehud Olmert is a new prime minister who unlike most previous Israeli leaders does not have much of a record as a "war hero". His party, Kadima was only created just before the March general elections which brought it to power and is made up of many of the dinosaurs of Israel’s political scene from its two main parties, Labour and Likud. It does not really have a unified political policy and cracks are beginning to appear in it. Despite Olmert’s warlike rhetoric of refusing to negotiate with those who have taken Israeli soldiers prisoner, it is unlikely that brutal military repression will bring about their release. There is an extremely strong tradition in Israeli Jewish society that the political and military leadership are personally responsible for any prisoners taken in armed conflict. Kadima’s standing in the opinion polls has already fallen – if there was an election now it would lose four out of twenty nine seats.

Important objectives are at stake here as well. Olmert was elected on the basis of pushing ahead with the "convergence plan". This aims to finish the ‘separation wall’ (which will divide Israeli territory from the Occupied Territory), and withdraw from some isolated settlements on the West Bank. This plan would, however, include the remaining major settlement blocks within Israeli territory as part of a unilaterally imposed "final settlement" of Israel’s borders. Before the latest military operations there was majority support for this plan amongst Israelis – now this is no longer the case.

In addition, rather than weakening support for Hamas and Hezbollah, these military operations have enraged the Palestinian masses and particularly the population in southern Lebanon. One result is, therefore, most likely to be increased support for both Hamas and Hezbollah.

However, neither of these two groups will be able to solve the basic problems of the masses on the basis of what would be, if they had their way, theocratic, capitalist regimes.

The working class of the region, drawing along with it the poor peasantry, are the only force capable of defeating imperialism, capitalism and the corrupt Arab elites and fulfilling the desire of the Palestinians for their social and national liberation. Conversely they will be the section of the population who suffer the most in situations of armed conflict or war.

The huge anger that exists against the pernicious role of imperialism needs to be channelled in the direction of building new working class movements and parties, based on the ideas of a socialist confederation of the Middle East, the removal of all imperialist armed forces, and the overthrow of capitalism and feudalism in the region.

Undoubtedly the prospect of further conflict and war fills workers and young people around the world and particularly in the Middle East with dread because of the terrible suffering it could mean. However, capitalist wars and conflict will also see further working class struggles against privatisation and attacks on workers living standards which have already taken place in countries like Iran, Egypt and Israel. Such movements will come to the fore again but with a different consciousness – one that is imbued with a desire for an end to bloodshed and a new society where the mass of the population control the huge wealth that exists in the region.

Unlike the US neo-cons plans for the region this is not a Utopia but based on historical experience. At the height of the internecine Lebanese civil war in 1988, Lebanese workers across the sectarian divide took strike action against the collapse in the value of the minimum wage as a result of the galloping inflation caused by the conflict. Along the "green line" which divided Christian and Muslim Beirut joint demonstrations took place on this issue. During the same conflict between half and one million Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the IDF invasion in Lebanon.

However, socialists and activists cannot simply sit back and wait for these developments in the future. A movement for revolutionary socialist change needs to be built as a matter of urgency right across the region now.