Leninist Trotskyist Fraction statement
A pact between the UN, Zionism, Siniora and the Hizbollah leadership tries to do what the Israeli army could not do, impose disarmament and surrender on the Hizbollah and Palestinian resistance. Out with the new troops of occupation of the imperialistic butchers of the UN! Turn the civil wars in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq into the beginning of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Lebanon, Palestine and the whole Middle East, so that it becomes the grave of the Zionist-fascist state of Israel and the genocidal imperialist troops in Iraq!
The genocidal Zionist army of Olmert and Bush smashed its teeth against the heroic national war of resistance of Hizbollah and the masses of the south of the Lebanon
After 34 days of systematic bombing of the workers districts of Beirut and the south of Lebanon, leaving thousands of dead and wounded, the Zionist army of Israel - the fourth most powerful in the world commanded by Olmert and Bush, could not even occupy securely one kilometer into the south of Lebanon. It broke its teeth against the heroic resistance that cost thousands of lives of workers and oppressed people, including many of the the 100s of thousands displaced Palestinians.
Because it could not win against a guerilla army, Israel agreed to a cease-fire on Monday 14 of August at 8 am and began to retreat back across the border. The ceasefire agreement provides that from the 17 of August the Lebanese army will start to move 15,000 troops south of the Litani river, and that along with around 2000 French troops already in the Lebanon, there will be an ‘international force’ of up to 15,000 under the command of UNIFIL. Its objective: to disarm Hisbollah and the other militias in the south of the Lebanon. That is to say, to impose what imperialism and his Zionist gendarme Israel could not do in more than a month of military destruction.
We shall see if the can achieve this objective. The Lebanese and Palestinian exiles of the south of the Lebanon - and of all Middle East, that resisted heroically against a high tech military machine, feel victorious. That is why more of million workers, farmers and their families - Palestinian and Lebanese from the south, that had taken refuge to the north of the Litani river, immediately after the ceasefire began a mass migration back to their homes and land in the south.
One said they were returning “as a tribute to the Resistance. For that reason it is necessary to return: they have died fighting by us and for Lebanon. The best way to fight Israel is to overcome outfear and to re-occupy our houses. That act intimidates the Israelis. They never thought that we would return and that they would lose the war” (Clarin, 15/08/06). In Bint Jbeil, a shepherd who returned to that city where the most brutal battles wre fought exclaimed: “Praise be to God, we won this war. We saved our land and we defeated to the Israeli army in spite of all its high technology” (Libération, France, 17/08/06)
The goal of Bush and the Zionist state in this new “war for oil” is to turn Lebanon into a protectorate to plunder the oil wealth of the Caucasus
Bush and Olmert has a clear objective in sending the army against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank at the end of June, and then going to war against Lebanon in the middle of July. This was to finally destroy the Palestinian resistance in the same way NATO bombed the Bosnian Serbs in the Balkans in the 1990s. They wanted to massively defeat the resistance in Gaza and Transjordan where the people are already imprisoned in concentration camps, causing a new diaspora. They were also determined to smash Hizbollah and its defence of the Palestine masses in the south of Lebanon because it forced Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 sparking the second intefada. In defeating Hizbollah Lebanon could be turned into a new Yankee protectorate.
Anglo/US imperialism and its Zionist gendarme needed to fulfill these objectives to be able to be guarantee the oil pipeline from the ex- Soviet republics of Kazajstán and Azerbaiján to Israel. British Petroleum has built a pipe line from Bakú to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean in Turkey. The pipeline is planned to go from Ceyhan under the sea to Haifa where it will be piped to the Red Sea and on to Asia. Israel also wants access to water from the Litani r iver and further north. For these projects the US and the Zionist state needs to control the Mediterranean coast and the south of the Lebanon. So despite rhetoric about captured soldiers and Hizbollah being Iran’s proxy, the real purpose of this war was once more oil, as it was in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And because wars for oil always generate resistance, Yankee imperialism looked to use this war to teach a lesson to the the resistance movements, in particular the Iraqi resistance that has bogged down the Anglo/US troops and caused crises for Bush and Blair at home. It gambled on a victory against Hizbollah to strengthen its Sunni allies in Iraq against the Shiite Mahdi army, and to free its military to invade other countries such as Syria and Iran.
These objectives explain why the attacks on Lebanon were of a surgical precision. They destroyed the workers districts and the Palestinian camps of the south so as to defeat the working class, in particular the Palestinian masses. They destroyed the bridges and ports that were not needed in their plan to create a secure passage for the oil pipe lines and water aqueducts. On the other hand they left the districts of the bourgeoisie with its luxury hotels, summer houses, and exclusive tourist centers, absolutely intact – so that the bourgeois cooled off in their swimming pools while thousands of poor people died in Beirut. They also left the the modern “City” of Beirut, the properties of the bourgeoisie in the north of the country, and, the quarters of the Lebanese army, intact.
They expected that the Lebanese bourgeoisie would “blame” Hizbollah for the war, and so give more authority to the government of Siniora and to the army of the Lebanon – pro-Yankee mercenaries and allies of Zionism – supported by NATO troops, would finish smashing and disarming the masses in the south. But after more than a month, it was obvious that Bush and the Zionist state ad failed to fulfill their objectives in their war of destruction: they were prevented by the heroic resistance of the armed masses.
The armed masses’ heroic war of resistance stopped the fourth most powerful army on the planet which had to be rescued by the imperialist UNIFIL ‘multinational peacekeepers’
While its humiliated troops retreated from Lebanon before a tide of civilians, the Zionist General Staff along with Bush complained that Hizbollah was not a regular army and did not fight according to the rules of war! Hizbollah were “terrorists without scruples” that used the “civilian population” as “human shields”. What total hypocrisy from these imperialist Zionist butchers! They, the imperialists and the Zionists, are the true terrorists. They do not have any scruples in using the masses and the peoples of the world as “civilian” targets! The US imperialists killed millions in the last 30 years in Iraq alone, and are still killing every day tens of innocent civilians!
The “terrorists” are the Zionists who reduce to rubble half of Lebanon, rubble under which there are thousands of corpses of workers, farmers, women, children, and old people! The Zionist state is racist and fascist. It is a racist state, where torture is legal! It is the state that for over half a century has been killing the Palestinian people systematically, and where Mossad “openly murders selectively” using snipers to assassinate leaders of the organizations of the Palestine resistance in complete daylight. A fascist state, yes, because fascism – the most extreme form of capitalist rule during the epoch of imperialism – locks up the working class in concentration camps, surrounded by walls, wire fences, soldiers, and fascist colonies, in much the way Nazism did against the Jewish people in Europe during World War II.
But what Bush and Olmert cannot hide is that the Zionist army failed not because it met “terrorists” who broke the rules of war, but because the armed people defended their lives, their land, houses and their families against an occupation army. It had to face a heroic national civil war of resistance of the armed masses, in which each house and each piece of land, became a trench, and each “civilian” a combatant. What Bush and Olmert call “terrorists” and “human shields”, were in reality Lebanese and Palestinian workers and farmers of the south that, from the roofs of their houses, shot Katiushas against the enemy, and fought in combat house to house, hand-to-hand. According to a teacher from Aïta al-Chaab, a town a few metre from the border with the Zionist state: “We fought not for love of the war, but to protect our lives, our women, our children (...) We are common people. The fighter that destroyed that Israeli tank military there, is the town’s medical doctor” (Libération, France, 17/08/06)
It was this heroic resistance of the masses that it prevented the Zionist army after a month of destruction, from holding onto even a kilometer of territory to the south of the Litani River!
More than this, the workers and the exploited people of all Middle East began to rise up in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran and Iraq in defence of the Lebanese resistance. This put at risk all the survile bourgeois regimes and governments of the region. In Iraq, enormous mobilizations of hundreds of thousands of Shiites threatened to rise up against the puppet government whose main support is indeed the Shiite bourgeoisie of Iraq and Iran. The anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist mobilisations of the masses of the Middle East threatened to set fire to the region. Meanwhile inside the imperialistic countries - in the United States, the UK and Europe etc more militant sections of the workers and youth protested strongly against the huge destruction and the massacres in towns like Qana.
What is more, instead of “blaming” Hizbollah for the war as the US and Zionists had expected, the more violent the destruction the more the masses joined the resistance, shouting “We are all Hizbollah” and “They bomb Tel Aviv”. Thus, if the Zionist army had continued to advance into the territory of Lebanon, there was the real threat of a revolutionary mass uprising. This could have overthrown the bourgeois leadership of Hizbollah, disarmed the pro-Zionist army of Lebanon, and used the arms to bring down the pro-imperialistic government of Siniora. That this was a real possiblity was reflected in the slogan “Bomb Tel Aviv” which would have turned the resistance into a counter-offensive. This would have been a signal for an uprising of the masses of Gaza and Transjordan in the fight to destroy the Zionist-facist of Israel.
The Palestinian and Lebanese masses prove that the working class is the only class that can defend the nation against imperialism
It was not lack of heroísm or lack of will to fight that stopped the masses from going down this road. The national bourgeoisies of the Middle East, that all national bourgeoisies in semi colonial or colonial countries, try to get as bigger slice of profits by negotiation with imperialism. However, as soon as the revolutionary masses begin to threaten their class interests, their property and the state itself, they turn against the masses to defend those interests and those of imperialism.
The bourgeoisies of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, long allies of the US and the Zionist state – just like the Druse and Maronite bourgeoisies of Lebanon, and the client government of Siniora – demanded the “disarmament of Hizbollah” and in each country brutally repressed the demonstrations of the oppressed masses in support to their Palestinian brothers and sisters of the south of the Lebanon.
So the Iranian the Syrian bourgeoisie, despite threatening “the mother of all battles” against imperialism and Zionism”, suddenly became “neutral”. They did not move a finger in support of the masses of Lebanon and historical Palestine when tens of thousands of Syrian and Iranian workers demonstrated against the imperialist and Zionist butchers. So the large armies of Syria and Iran did not come to the aid of the heroic resistance of the masses, leaving more than a thousand dead, tens of thousands injured and the south of Lebanon devastated.
On the contrary, the Syrian bourgeoisie offered to be a “mediator” to negotiate the exchange of prisoners and even promised to support the US in its “war against terrorism”. In Iran the Shiite bourgeoisie of ayatollahs also acts as a guarantor of the puppet colaborationist government in Iraq, and in turn the stability of the US protectorate and the commands the ‘Iraqi’ army and the police in the civil war against the resistance.
Equally, the leadership of Hizbollah - an organization that is alliled to the Iranian Shiite bourgeoisie and the ayatollahs –is incapable of fighting a national war against the invader until the end. For that reason, during the war, it did not break with the client regime of Siniora or call for itw overthrow It did not call on the masses to march on the barracks of the Lebanese army to disarm it and to create workers and peasants militias. It refused to call on Syria and Iran to declare war on Zionism, or the Shiite masses in Iraq to rise up against the puppet government.
They refused to act on the demand raised by the masses of Palestine and Lebanon to “Bomb Tel Aviv”. On the contrary, it limited its missile strikes, declaring that it would only attack Tel Aviv if Israel bombed the center of Beirut – that is, the financial and business center, despite the bombardment of the workers districts and the heaquarters of Hizbollah.
Yet the workers and peasants of south Lebanon, by their heroic national war of resistance against the Zionist attack showed once again that neither Hizbollah, nor Hamas, or any fraction of the national bourgeoisies can defend the nation from imperialism. They demonstrated that in Lebanon, in historical Palestine – as in any country oppressed by imperialism, the working class is the only truely national class, with the interest and the will to defend the nation against imperialism.
UNSC 1701: A pact between the UN, Zionism, Siniora and Hizbollah leaders to make the mass resistance disarm and surrender
Because of the heroic resistance of the masses, imperialism and the Zionist state could not totally destroy Hizbollah and the Palestinians in Lebanon. As is the case in Iraq, the Lebanese masses proved capable of putting up a stiff opposition to the imperialist/Zionist offensive. Opening up a second front in which the masses faced the US/Zionist “war of terror” was a victory for the world wide proletariat.
But the bourgeois leadership of Hizbollah prevented this heroic national war of resistance from turning into the start of a workers and peasants revolution in Lebanon and Palestine capable of spreading to the whole Middle East. This was the only real prospect of defeating the Zionist army, destroying the State of Israel and burying the occupying Anglo/US troops in the sands of Iraq.
Therefore, the halting of the war by means of a cease-fire creates a provisional status quo based on a pact between the UN Security Council whose permanent members, US, UK, France, China and Russia are imperialist powers or otherwise major rivals for the world’s resources, the Zionist-fascist state of Israel, the pro-imperialistic client regime of Lebanon and the bourgeois leadership of Hizbollah.
This pact has the objective of achieving what Bush and the Zionist army could not do, defeating the Palestinian and Lebanese masses of the south, and destroying the only powerful guerilla army, Hizbollah, that can fight for the national independence of Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan.
In order to implement the plan the Hizbollah must withdraw north of the Litani river while the south is occupied by 15,000 soldiers of the Lebanese army, which fired not one short defend the nation against the Zionist assault, and 15,000 “blue helmets” of the UN, who have the task of disarming the masses and locking up the Palestinian refugees in concentration camps.
The cynicism of the permanent members of the UNSC has no limits. UNSC Resolution 1701 does not condemn the war of agression of the Zionist-facist state of Israel that left Lebanon in ruins killing more than a thousand workers and their families. It presents these UN mercenaries who authorised the massacres in the Balkans, the first war against Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, and the massacre of the Palestinian people that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, as the guarantors of “peace” in the south of the Lebanon!
If this plan is to succeed Hizbollah will have to use all of its prestige and mass support won in the fight against the Zionist army, to persuad the masses to accept the rule of the pro-imperilalist army of Siniora,the UN ‘blue helmets’ and to give up its arms. This will be a difficult task. Each house in the south of Lebanon was a site of resistance, and each family has dead to honour. The masses feel like victors and are returning to their land and homes in the south where some Zionist troops remain and only a few kilometers separate them from the borders of the state of Israel.
If they do not convince the masses to give up their arms th e next plan may be the one used against the Bosnians. The UN surrounded the Bosnian cities of Sebrenica and Gorazde, entered and disarmed them and then allowed the Serbian troops of Milosevic to come and “ethnically cleanse” the Bosnian people. This is what they are preparing with the counter-revolutionary pact between the UN, Siniora, the Lebanese army and the state of Israel!
The French imperialist butchers want to take charge of the occupation to advance their interests in the Middle East
France proposed the pact to the UN Security Council of the UN and already has around 2000 troops in Lebanon which arrived in mid July “to evacuate its citizens”. This is no accident. French imperialism is in a desparate rivalry with US imperialism for markets, spheres of influence and oil pipelines. It is in partnership with the Syrian and Iranian bourgeoisie of the Bazaar (Shiite), just as it was with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, before the Anglo/US invasion cancelled Frances oil contracts with Iraq. Iran supplies oil to France and gas to Russia which pipes it to the ex-Soviet republics of the Baltic.
For that reason, the failure of the US/Zionist aims to defeat Hizbollah and partition Lebanon has created an opening for French imperialism to play a larger role in the region. That is why Chirac proposed the UN ceasefire resolution, some thousands of troops, and offered to lead the UNIFIL operation in Lebanon so that it could have more influence over the Lebanese regime.
Chirac and the greedy French monopolies already speculate on their increased profits. Anglo/US imperialism and Zionist Israel will now have to offer a share of the gas and oil of Azerbaiján and Kazakjstán passing through Turkey and the Mediterranean, to their French competitors in exchange for guarantees of stablility in Lebanon.
The French imperialist butchers will not hesitate to smash in fire and blood the popular resistance in the south of Lebanon, just as they did in the Balkans where the French “blue helmets” permitted the Serbian massacre of the Bosnians, or as they did in the Ivory Coast of Africa; are as they did against the Algerian people fighting the French colonial yoke. These are the bloodthirsty French imperialistic butchers who the treacherous leaders of the World Social Forum paint as “democratic” and “pacifists” before the workers and the exploited peoples of the world! French imperialism hands off the Lebanon, Palestine and the Middle East!
The pact will also help conceal the ongoing Zionist repression in Gaza and the West Bank
During the month that Israel assaulted Lebanon, imperialism, the UN, the mainstream media and the client bourgeoisies of the Middle East, all did their best to hide the fact that the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel continued its barbaric killing and repressing of the the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank.
More than 200 Palestinian workers, peasants, women and children were killed from 28 June onward. There are 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners still being ill treated and tortured in the Zionist jails. In Gaza and Transjordan, the population is locked up behind walls, surrounded by the Israeli army, with all their roads, bridges and border posts. These are nothing but two great ghettos, two concentration camps where hunger, thirst, disease and despair reign. There is no food, there is no medicine, there is no water, there is no work, it is not possible to be come or go. If this is not the same fascism used by the Nazis against Jews, then what is?
The ceasefire pact is also to create the impression that the war is over, whereas in reality the killing continues in Gaza and Transjordan. Before long under the eyes of UNIFIL the Israelis will be preparing to slaughter the disarmed Palestinian and Lebanese masses in the south of the Lebanon.
Hands off Lebanon and Palestine! Down with the client regime of Siniora and his sepoy army!
We must stop this imperialist/Zionist pact, ceasefire, etc from being imposed on the heroic Palestinian masses and the people of the south of the Lebanon! UN troops out of Lebanon!
The Lebanese army refused to fight and to defend the nation from the brutal attack of the Zionist army. For committees of soldiers to sack the officers and disarm them and put the arms to the use of the resistance!
For workers’ and peasants’ militias from the north of the Lebanon to Gaza and Transjordan. For revolutionary national war to destroy the Zionist-fascist state of Israel!
The masses of south Lebanon, and of of the workers districts of Beirut, who resisted the Zionist army, had their houses and infrastructure destroyed. Roads, bridges, power etc were wiped out. A quarter of the total population of the Lebanon is now returning to their towns and villages to the south of the Litani river to find a devastated land, without houses, food, water, medicines or hospitals. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie and the rich middle-class of the north that did not fight, nor defend the country from the Zionist invasion, have their properties and luxurious houses intact, and do not have to suffer hunger, thirst, cold, and only risk sunburn when basking in their swimming pools.
For a workers emergency economic plan to provide adequate living conditions for the workers and peasants families who defended the nation!
For the immediate expropriation without compensation and under workers control, of the mansions, tourist hotels, summer houses etc. of the bourgeoisies of the Lebanon, to provide food, water, medicine, and shelter to the Palestinian and Lebanese masses!
Down with the imperialist-Zionist client regime of Siniora and Co!
Transform the heroic civil war of resistance against imperialism and the Zionist-fascist state into a counter-offensive and the beginning of the workers and peasants revolution in Lebanon and historical Palestine.
A Workers’ and Peasants’ government is necessary to defeat the imperialist occupation!
A Lebanese Workers and Peasants’ government can become a bastion in the struggle to build destroy the state Zionist-fascist of Israel and to win a secular, democratic and nonracist Palestinian state, and open the road for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the armed Palestinian masses.
The international working class must reject the ceasefire that has been imposed on the Palestinian and Lebanese masses!
The international working class must support the Iraqi resistance in the growing counter-offensive against the puppet government of the protectorate, to fight for its overthrow and to expel the invading troops!
The workers and peasants of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the whole Middle East must break their submission to their own bourgeoisies and redouble the combat against their governments which stand by while the Zionists kill the Palestinian and Lebanese masses, and use the blood of the resistance fighters as small change in their negotiations with imperialism and Zionism.
Only in this way will the workers and peasants of the region will be able to advance towards a Federation of Workers and Peasants’ Republics of the Middle East, defeating imperialism and Zionism, and the regimes of their junior partners, the national bourgeosies, to create the conditions for peace and justice in the region.
The Zionist-fascist state of Israel must be destroyed and imperialism buried in the sands!
Once again, the heroic resistance of the Palestinian and Lebanese masses, has tested the strength of the military might of imperialism and Zionism, and has won a victory for the workers and exploited peoples of the world.
The US and British workers are strengthened in their fight against the weakened Bush and Blair regimes. The working class youth of France are also strengthened in their fight against the persecution and deportation of the French bourgeoise and their imperialist regime.
Recognising this fact, the world wide working class, espcially in the imperialist countries, must honour this struggle and raise as their battle flag “Long Live our class brothers and sisters of Palestine, of south Lebanon, of Iraq and all the Middle East; the Zionist-fascist state of Israel must die, and the Anglo-US invading army must be buried in the sands of Iraq!”
Our first task is to smash the counter-revolutionary pact between the UN, the US, France, the Zionist state and the client regime of the Lebanon. UNIFIL hands off Lebanon!
The French working class has a great responsibility in its hands, against its own bourgeoisie leading the imperialist occupation of Lebanon. It must prevent a repeat of the ‘Balkans’ massacres against the Palestinian and Lebanese masses: is necessary for working youth rise up again to the shout of:
“French imperialism hands off Palestine, Lebanon and the Middle East”!
French trooops out of Lebanon or Paris and every city in France will every nigh become “a Baghdad”!
Stop the imperialist troops being sent to occupy Iraq to aid the victory of the Iraqian resistance!
For the defeat of the Anglo-US troops in Iraq and for the victory of the Iraqi masses!
Out with all imperialistic troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East!
To achieve this it will be necessary to defeat the labour aristocracies and the bureaucratic leaderships of the the World Social Forum that subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie by calling on the imperialists “to fight for peace” and painting the UN and the French imperialistic butchers in the Middle East as “democratic” and “pacifist”.
To break with the bourgeoisie, the workers in the imperialist countries, in Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific, must make the victory of the heroic resistance of the Palestinian masses, of the Lebanon and the Middle East, their common demand: “So that the Palestinian people and the oppressed masses of the Middle East live, the Zionist-fascist state of Israel and imperialism, must die!
Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction 17 August of 2006
From Class Struggle 68 August-September 2006
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