By: Rafiq Shemali(Lebnese Communist Party)
Today war is raging between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and northern Israel. As of the beginning of October over a thousand Lebanese have been killed by Israeli military strikes and the casualties are mounting daily, thousands wounded and about 800,000 Lebanese displaced from their homes. About 70,000 Israeli’s have also been displaced by Hezbollah rocket strikes. This war began with Hezbollah’s decision to break the cease-fire with Israel on October 8, the day after the Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Hezbollah’s claim to fame has been its narrative that it liberated southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation. It has used that along with its rhetoric of support to the Palestinian cause to mobilize support among the masses and extend its political influence in the country.
With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the fall of Beirut, Lebanon all the way up to and including the capital city were occupied by Israeli forces. A rightwing Phalangist government was put in place. The coalition of leftwing organizations – the Lebanese National Movement faced severe repression and dissolved, and the thousands of PLO fighters were forced to leave the country.
Subsequently, various parties on the left, led by the Communist Party of Lebanon, the Progressive Socialist Party and the Organization of Communist Action of Lebanon formed the Lebanese National Resistance Front to organize the struggle against the Israeli occupation army and to organize opposition to the new Phalangist government. The LNRF organized mass resistance through strikes and protests, as well as armed guerrilla actions against the Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon. A mass uprising in West Beirut in 1984 led to the liberation of western Beirut from Phalangist government control. Other rural areas, villages, towns and cities were subsequently liberated as the Israeli army was pushed out from Sidon, Nabatiyeh and Tyre by the end of the 1980s. Anti-war actions and opposition by Israeli citizens contributed substantially to this withdrawal. The largest protest against the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps by the Phalangist militias, allies of the Israeli government, in 1982 actually occurred in Tel Aviv numbering 400,00 people. Only a narrow border band, 10-30 kilometers deep remained under Israeli military control.
In 1989, under the pressure of the capitalist Assad regime in Syria and the Saudi Monarchy, the various parties that had been engaged in the civil war in Lebanon which had broken out in 1975, reached an agreement known as the Taef Agreement. The guarantors of this agreement were the presence of the Syrian army in large swaths of Lebanon. As part of the Agreement, all the militias were to disarm. The forces in the LNRF did so. The only exception to this, at the insistence of the Syrian regime, were the two Shiite Islamist parties Hezbollah and Amal. Parties that had remained outside of the LNRF and had functioned counter to the LNRF.
Hezbollah’s claim of liberating Lebanon from Israeli occupation falls flat when confronted with these facts. Its resistance actions became important only after the LNRF had disarmed and disbanded and after most of the occupied lands had already been liberated. Only the narrow band in the south had remained under Israeli military occupation.
The very areas where the CPL and the OCAL, but especially the CPL had a very strong base of support – in fact was the strongest party, in the southern suburbs of Beirut – the Dhahyieh, in the south of Lebanon, in the Bekaa valley, areas that are working class and poor Shiite peasants, became the centers of Hezbollah domination. In fact, Hezbollah was formed in 1982 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to advance the foreign policy aims of the reactionary clerical bourgeois regime in Tehran and to do so they had to counter the influence of the “left”.
This is what happens when parties that claim to be communist and socialist refuse to lead a revolution, in fact they derail it – demoralized people turned to reactionary Islamist currents – which Hezbollah definitely is regardless of the label of “Resistance”.
It should be noted here that he regime in Iran actually carried out a counter revolution against the mass movement of millions that overthrew the Shah’s regime in 1979, the new regime targeted the mass workers Shoras (councils) that had emerged during the revolution, the trade unions, the rights of women, the national minorities, the political parties on the left with massive thugs like repression. The regime is not a continuation of the 1979 revolution but its diametric opponent.
Hezbollah in Lebanon is a sectarian Shiite party by choice. It only accepts Shiites in its ranks especially in its fighting units. It aims to defend the interests of the Shiite bourgeoisie in dividing up the confessional religious pie in Lebanon. It is a major government party since the 1990s and it along with its allies Amal (another Shiite party built to counter the PLO and the “left” in the 1970s), has stood against every major working class mobilization, claiming these are inspired by the US embassy to weaken Hezbollah, workers strikes were denounced by Hezbollah as provocations, it has stood against the massive popular mobilizations that broke out after the murder of the Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri that demanded an end to Syrian military occupation, it stood against the mobilization of 2019, again numbering in the millions against the impact of the collapse of the economy on working people and the middle classes, it stood against the prosecution of those responsible for the massive port explosion in 2020, it has stood for maintaining the confessional religious system, for maintaining the discriminatory family laws against women, it has stood for maintaining the unjust legal limitations on Palestinians – limitations that prevent Palestinian refugees from renting, owning property and from dozens of skilled jobs. In 2008 when the government took decisions that Hezbollah disagreed with it set its militias loose and captured most of Beirut, forcing the government to back down. Those that see in Hezbollah something progressive should keep the above in mind.
The fight by Palestinians for national rights is used by them as an excuse to dominate politics in Lebanon and to advance Tehran’s reactionary expansionist capitalist attempt to dominate the region at the expense of its capitalist competitors in the region and the world.
Since 2019, Lebanon has been in its deepest economic and social crisis since its inception during the French colonial mandate in the 1920s. The currency has been devalued from 1500 LL / USD to 100,000 LL / USD. Wages have stayed at 2019 level. All bank accounts were frozen, the middle class lost all their savings. Seventy percent of the population is now under the poverty level. Hezbollah has been a central part of government as this happened. It has not lifted a finger to mobilize people to address these social problems impacting toilers, on the contrary it has opposed any mobilizations.
On October 7, the so called “Al Aqsa Flood”, the name Hamas gave to the massacre of 1200 mostly civilians in southern Israel, the taking of about 250 hostages and the rape of dozens of women. Hamas in its very charter calls not only for the complete destruction of Israel as an entity but for the killing of all Jews. On October 7 it acted with that in mind. This was not an act of “resistance”, it had nothing to do with Palestinian national rights.
As mentioned earlier, on October 8, Hezbollah broke the cease-fire agreement with Israel that had been in place since July of 2006 with salvos of rockets aimed at communities in northern Israel. In September the region witnessed a major escalation as Israel’s government mounted massive attacks aimed at Hezbollah fighters, installations, cadre and leaders. Thousands of civilians have also been killed and thousands wounded in the Hezbollah controlled areas where Shiites live, mostly working people of town and country. So called “collateral damage” in the Israeli Defense Forces assault.
In addition, Hezbollah has launched this war as an individual political party with weapons. The support, or consent of the Lebanese government, Parliament was never sought, let alone the support of the majority of the population. Unlike in 2006 when Israel launched a massive invasion, Hezbollah’s war since October 8 with Israel had been quite unpopular in the country. “How does this help liberate Palestine?” “How about the consequences for people in this country, a country which is going through its worst economic crisis in its history, a country which has been at war so many times in the recent past?” These are the questions people are posing, especially among non-Shiites. The Lebanese masses are in essence being held by the Hezbollah/Tehran foreign policy aims as hostage in its conflict with Israel.
Hassan Nasrallah’s last speech after the hundreds of booby-trapped pagers and walkie talkies blew up had three points worth noting: He referred to the October 7 attack as “the blessed al-Aqsa Flood”. Killing hundreds of civilians, women, children, men for simply being Jews or for working alongside Jews – is thus “blessed” by God. What message is sent to ordinary Israeli? That they are all enemies to be killed?
He also stressed that there will be no end to the rocket attacks on Israel until a cease-fire is reached in Gaza, i.e. Hezbollah will continue with its rocket launches until Hamas is back in control in Gaza. How can you win Israeli toilers to your side, toilers who have been forced to also leave their homes? What about the Lebanese villagers? Who comes across as the aggressor here? If you are leading a liberation struggle, which both Hamas and Hezbollah claim, you have a responsibility for the population you are purportedly liberating. Neither. Hamas nor Hezbollah has built a single bomb shelter for the people it controls. Yet they have been preparing for war for 20 years.
Nasrallah also called the population in northern Israel settlers. It is not a matter of semantics. That immediately means that they don’t belong there and should leave no matter how many generations pass. He also did not address the fact that large swaths of northern Israel are populated by Palestinian citizens of Israel. The Hezbollah bombing of Majd al-Shams in July in the Golan Heights struck an Arab village where a dozen Arab youth were killed playing soccer by rockets. It is not just that Israeli lives don’t matter, it is also that Arab lives don’t matter. Life is not paramount, martyrdom is.
It is necessary to look at Israel as it is. It is a class divided society. The Israeli government is a capitalist government that defends the interests of a capitalist ruling class and not the majority which are potentially allies, class brothers and sisters of Palestinian and Lebanese toilers even if they may not be aware of that at this time. Yet, unlike the petty-bourgeois left, or the Islamists, communists should have confidence that working people in Israel, as they fight for their interests will come to that realization – that is at the heart of a perspective forward – the only perspective forward. Communists do not give support to the political aims or to the methods of the capitalist government in Israel as it wages this current war with its thousands of civilian deaths, the so-called “collateral damage”. Civilian “collateral damage’ is not going to inhibit them, never has and never will. That is how capitalist governments wage war.
In order to have capitalism you need a bourgeoisie but also, and more importantly, a proletariat. Marx and Engels explained that in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto. Israel is a capitalist state with a capitalist class that exploits workers and working farmers. It also oppresses the Palestinian people denying them their national rights or even equal rights and /or opportunities.
The majority of the working class in Israel today is Jewish. Seven million Jews live there. Twenty one percent of the Israeli state’s citizens is Palestinian Arab. They work in the same factories, schools, hospitals, transportation centers, as Israeli Jewish workers. In addition, there are workers from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as well as an increasing number of immigrant workers from South and East Asia. What is needed in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon is the organization and unification of the working class into an independent political force that fights for its interests as a class. The working class in alliance with the small farmers will have as a historic task the overthrow of the Israeli capitalist exploiters, as well as the Palestinian ones in the West Bank and Gaza, the seizure of power by the workers and farmers and the fight to eliminate capitalist social relations.
This is now the only road forward for the oppressed Palestinian nationality – other roads have led them from defeat to defeat. This is also the only road to ending anti-Semitic Jew-hatred spreading around the world.
The slogan of the newly formed Communist International under Lenin’s leadership was “Workers of the world and oppressed peoples unite!”
Do Hezbollah’s as well as Hamas’s reactionary armed actions advance the line of march towards working class unity? Do the Hezbollah rockets descending on northern Israel help win over Israeli toilers in the countryside and beyond? No, they do not. In fact, they create conditions that push back that perspective. They do not advance the struggle for Palestinian national rights – Hamas is currently the biggest obstacle to that struggle. The only road towards achieving those is through class unity in the region, including in Israel. That means seeing Israeli toilers as potential allies and not settlers to be expelled. Eighty years of so-called armed struggle have failed and will continue to fail, bringing only death and misery to the toilers.
Lebanon has 19 official religious confessions. Power is constitutionally divided up between the leaders of these sects. Catholic (Maronite ) Christainas get the Presidency, the Prime Minister is always Sunni, the Speaker of the Parliament is Shiite. All government posts and parliament seats are this divided. This has meant no unified national consciousness could emerge and this also has meant that working people are divided along these religious lines.
Hezbollah has defended this setup while it has fought for a larger share for the Shiite bourgeoisie at the expense of the other bourgeois forces. Hezbollah is a major obstacle to working class unity in Lebanon itself. It advances a sectarian perspective based on the needs of the Shiite bourgeoisie as well as the regime in Tehran. It is a major pillar of bourgeois sectarian confessional rule in the country.