Emma Clancy
Watching television footage of the Qana massacre — the killing of dozens of civilians, including children — Beshara Doumani thought she was watching "the old footage of the Israeli massacre that killed one-hundred Lebanese civilians in the village of Qana during Operation 'Grapes of Wrath' in 1996". But, she wrote in a July 30 article for Electronic Intifada, "it suddenly becomes clear: another massacre at the same village, Qana, ten years later".
Claiming that the Lebanese government is responsible for the current war — supposedly for allowing the Hezbollah party to participate in the country's political process — Israel has taken advantage of this "unique opportunity" to undermine Lebanon as an independent state by obliterating its infrastructure.
Beacon of resistance
Forced out of southern Lebanon in 2000 by Hezbollah, which had fought a guerrilla war against the occupying forces since the 1982 Israeli invasion, Tel Aviv's key goal today is to destroy this resistance. Israel has been preparing this war for years.
The "only democracy in the Middle East", as it's dubbed by the Western political elite, will not tolerate the democratic expression of Arabs in Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories if they choose to ignore the dictates of Israel and the West and support Hezbollah and Hamas because of their resistance to the Zionist state and rejection of the crumbs of sovereignty offered by so-called "peace processes". If Hamas and Hezbollah are unable to be bought off, then they must be crushed violently is the political logic.
In the Occupied Territories, the landslide victory of Hamas in the January Palestinian Authority elections expressed a rejection of the approach of the previous Fatah-led administration to the Palestinian struggle for nationhood — in essence: compromise, collaboration and corruption.
For daring to elect Hamas, the Palestinian people are now being collectively punished, with Israel carrying out a vicious campaign, centred on Gaza, to terrorise the people into submission using air strikes, house-raids, and the assassination and imprisonment of elected leaders. More than 170 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of "Operation Summer Rain" on June 28.
The war on Lebanon should not be seen in isolation from this intensified onslaught against the Gaza Strip. Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, explained the relationship in a televised interview with Aljazeera's Ghassan Bin-Jiddu on July 20: "Inflicting a defeat on Lebanon means ending the resistance movements in the region, which is their intention. It also means ending the Palestinian cause and imposing the Israeli conditions in any political settlement."
Washington shares the goal of wiping out any remaining resistance to imperialist domination of the strategically important, oil-rich Middle East.
A sick society
Since the founding of the State of Israel 1948 by the Zionist movement (the movement to establish a "Jewish state") — and the consequent expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homes — Israel has pursued policies of war and expansionism.
The key consolidation point in the mutually beneficial Israel-US relationship was 1967, when Israel swiftly defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War. The war proved to Washington Israel's military capability and its value as a beachhead of imperialism in the rebellious and resource-rich Middle East by dealing a major blow to secular Arab nationalism through its defeat of Egypt, then led by President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In the decades since 1967, the US has consistently backed Israel's subjugation of the Palestinians and its permanent drive to expand its borders and to eliminate Arab resistance. In addition to occupying Palestine, Israel continues to occupy Syrian and Lebanese territory (the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms respectively) seized in the Six-Day War.
This state of permanent war and the neo-colonial politics underlying the Zionist project itself have created a synthesis of a siege mentality and a ruthless nationalism within Israel. The majority of the Israeli population are socialised to fear and loathe their Arab neighbours (and those Palestinians who live within the borders of Israel), and wars, such as the current assault on Lebanon, have often enjoyed widespread support.
An apartheid state has been constructed. Palestinians living in the impoverished West Bank and Gaza Strip live their lives at the "mercy" of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). They are (now literally) walled into a fragment of their original homeland, and are dependent on the Israeli state to "allow" their daily movement, trade, employment and education.
Within Israel's borders there is institutionalised racism, primarily against Arabs, but also against the non-European Jews. The US State Department's 2005 human rights report cited "institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country's Arab citizens".
A March 2006 poll conducted by Geocartographia for the Centre for the Struggle Against Racism found that more than two-thirds of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab, and 40% think Israel should "support the emigration of Arab citizens". Sixty-three per cent said that they believed Arab Israeli citizens posed a "security and demographic threat to the state", and 18% admitted that they felt hatred when they heard someone speaking Arabic.
'Break their bones'
The Israeli ruling class cultivate this hostility. As the violence continues in Lebanon — with the civilian death toll now more than 1000 — Gideon Levy described the current mood among Israel's elite in the August 9 Haaretz: "[Justice Minister] Haim Ramon 'doesn't understand' why there is still electricity in Baalbek [a Lebanese town east of the Litani River]; [national infrastructure minister] Eli Yishai proposes turning south Lebanon into a 'sandbox'; Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military correspondent, proposes an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses and the next day to conduct a parade of prisoners in their underwear, 'to strengthen the home front's morale'."
The infamous photos of Israeli schoolgirls writing messages on munitions to be fired against the Lebanese people is a graphic illustration of the "values" young Israelis are being instilled with.
The fundamental contradiction of Israeli society — that the Israeli state was founded and continues to exist based on the dispossession of Palestinians — cannot be escaped, so the Palestinians (and indeed all Arabs) must be dehumanised in order to justify their continuing oppression.
At the outbreak of the first intifada by Palestinians in 1987, the "dovish" Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli for his role in signing the 1993 Oslo Accords) ordered the army to "break their bones". The national aspirations of the Palestinians threaten Israel: so their bones, and their will, must be broken.
Zionism and anti-Semitism
There is dissent within the Israeli population to the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories and a small but significant movement of refuseniks — soldiers who either refuse to carry out military service in the Occupied Territories or refuse to serve in the Israeli military at all. There is also a minority in Israel today that is actively opposing the war against Lebanon, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's daughter, herself a refusenik.
However, much of the Israeli "peace" movement is supporting the current invasion of Lebanon. This section of the movement, epitomised by Peace Now, buys the line that Israel must destroy Hezbollah, because Hezbollah has declared its opposition to the existence of a Jewish state, a demand that Zionists claim is anti-Semitic.
However a distinction should be drawn between opposition to Israel's existence as a "Jewish state" and the historical and contemporary discrimination and oppression faced by members of the Jewish religion, including by those who seek to use Palestinians' suffering to justify anti-Semitism.
The growth in the 20th century enjoyed by the Zionist movement that spear-headed the establishment of Israel was a response to the rise of rabid anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe. In the face of the horrors of the Nazi holocaust, Zionists were able to win greater support for their neo-colonial project. Today, Zionists attempt to exploit Jewish suffering to justify the ongoing oppression of Palestinians.
Jewish people around the world share a common religion, not a nationality, but in the decades since the founding of the Israeli state a new nation — with its own common language (Hebrew), culture and economic life within a common territory — has developed. But the Israeli nation-state was founded on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the racist notion of "a land without people, for a people without land" — a doctrine not dissimilar from Australia's racist myth of terra nullius.
While Jews from anywhere in the world have the right to immigrate to Israel even in the absence of any familial connection — or indeed any connection other than their faith — Palestinian refugees and their families who fled Zionist violence are denied the right to return to their homeland.
Ultimately, Zionism amounts to an evasion of the task of fighting anti-Semitism, by accommodating to the view that Jews cannot live among non-Jews and so need a separate state. In reality, the struggle against the oppression of Jews is part of the struggle to abolish all forms of racism and religious persecution.
Within Israel, Zionism cuts across the divide that exists between the Israeli capitalist elite and the nation's working class, helping to obscure the fact that the working-class majority of Israelis have common class interests with the majority of Palestinians.
No peace without justice
Right now, we need to build an international anti-war movement to pressure Israel to withdraw from Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. But the problem of Palestine will not be solved simply by Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and the establishment of a formally independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The majority of Palestinians are refugees, numbering more than 3 million. The right of return of these refugees would in practice mean the end of Israel as an exclusively "Jewish state". Calling for a democratic, secular and inclusive state that occupies the territory of historical Palestine and in which religious, ethnic and national groups can enjoy equal rights — as opposed to a state that is based on institutionalised oppression as Israel currently is — is not anti-Semitic.
There will never be peace in the Middle East without justice — without the replacement of the Zionist, imperialist state with a democratic and just alternative. The only other option is maintaining the status quo: war after war of oppression and subjugation, because, short of outright genocide, the Palestinian and Lebanese struggles will not end.
A protester at Sydney's July 22 rally against the war held a placard that expressed this determination. It depicted the Israeli girls writing on the missiles, and below them the Lebanese and Palestinian children who had suffered the brutal effect of these weapons. The placard read: "We got your message — but we will never give up."
[Emma Clancy is a member of the national executive of Resistance, a socialist youth organisation. Visit <http://www.resistance.org.au> for more information.]