RIM: Take up the challenge to build a people’s revolutionary alternative

The US green light to Israel’s mass murder in Palestine and Lebanon

Thousands of sophisticated American-made precision bombs deliberately pound Lebanese towns and villages, mosques and churches, airports and ports, milk factories, grain silos, power stations and telecommunications infrastructure. Israeli leaflets scream at the Lebanese people to leave behind their homes before Israeli missiles strike, and those who flee are themselves bombed from the air in their vehicles, many with white flags flying, while bridges and roads are destroyed in order to leave people stranded and to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching them. As of this writing, about 1000 Lebanese have been killed by US bombs and other munitions in the hands of Israeli hit men (wearing army uniforms for the most part) and more than a quarter of the population displaced, and the count is rising daily.

Israel has played the role of attack dog for imperialist interests for over half a century, since its creation as a religious-based Zionist state on Palestinian land. How long would Israel last without the billions of dollars of support it receives from the United States? Today its role of gendarme for the region is being suddenly expanded for the geo-strategic aims of these world-scale terrorists headquartered in Washington who have spilled rivers of the people’s blood during wars and crimes of aggression committed all over the globe. As appalling and contemptible as these massacres carried out against the Lebanese population today are, they may well be a prelude to a much broader war to redraw the political, economic and social map of the Middle East to suit U.S. imperialist interests -- part of a global agenda. It is not just about controlling resources and oil, it’s about developing more complete US domination of a strategic region of the world and trying to break the will and crush the national aspirations and resistance of a population whose hatred for US imperialism in particular and for its armed Zionist thugs in Israel has few bounds. It also has the aim of reining in (or “changing”) regimes like Syria and Iran that are not fully under its command.

Israel’s invasion and air bombardments of Lebanese towns that began in 1982 killed nearly 20,000 people and, as Sharon’s Zionist army stood guard, hundreds of Palestinian were slaughtered by Phalangists at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. Hezbollah was formed in this period as a Shiite movement among Lebanese to fight against Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon, but it also acted as a force of restraint against the Palestinian resistance there. With its contradictory nature, and by avoiding solving the essential problem of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it contributed to maintaining a fragile Zionist-imperialist stability in that area.

The Israeli state machine of terror instead turned its attacks towards the West Bank and Gaza, murdering Palestinian militants and civilians, building “apartheid” walls to physically separate the two populations and their land, expanding its settlements into the territory carved out for Palestine, destroying its agricultural livelihoods, infrastructure and thousands of homes, and through its repressive system of controls maintaining those who aren’t in its prisons in a different form of captivity. With the election of Hamas in early 2006 – a reflection of the bankruptcy of previous efforts to reach an imperialist-sponsored accommodation with Israel – the US master together with Israel made the political – and military -- decision to put the talk of international “peace” aside and to use the occasion to break the back of the Palestinian government and to try to rout once and for all the Palestinian armed resistance to Israel’s daily terror regimen. The cascade of bombs on Lebanon to eliminate Hezbollah from the southern part of that country is a further step in this “militarised roadmap”. The purpose is not to achieve peace, but to pursue war and to reinforce through the act of mass carnage and destruction the US rulers’ and Israel’s self-designated right to kill anyone they want in the region in the name of whatever demagogy serves them at the time. Sometimes this talk invokes peace, at others it is to end “terrorism”, or to bring about the (implicitly bloody) birth pangs of democracy in the Middle East, as Bush’s current travelling saleswoman, Rice, put it. At the same time, even the most pro-Bush members of the world press are preparing public opinion for a situation of civil war in US-occupied Iraq, where neo-colonial democracy US-style is a murderous joke. And all the while the threats of punishing Syria and Iran escalate.
People all over the world seethe at the unjustness of this latest war of terror and devastation orchestrated between Washington and Tel Aviv, and at the pathetic hand-wringing talks among the European imperialist powers who are complicit in giving this “green light” to mass murder. After Iraq, major actors in Lebanon like the former coloniser France see their interests better served by joining the US war coalition this time around, and the pitifully subservient UN cannot even pass a Security Council resolution condemning Israel for an attack killing UN personnel in its own unarmed posts in Lebanon because of US veto power and overall domination of that institution.

It is way past time to put aside illusions about international forums and such institutions intervening to bring the world’s leading marauders to reason, as demonstrators expressed eloquently in turning their wrath against the UN offices in Beirut. How trustworthy is a US imperialist-brokered cease-fire scripted by those who openly flaunt their own right to use illegal cluster bombs, to violate past agreements like the Geneva convention, and commit crimes against humanity? We must convert our revulsion into conscious political opposition to stop their crimes and to prepare for the struggle that lies ahead. Truly taking the interests of the oppressed and exploited masses of the Middle East to heart means fighting against simple answers and not duplicating betrayals that people have already repeatedly suffered while heroically resisting. No reactionary forces based on religion or ethnicity can unite the diverse peoples and many nationalities of the Middle East – from occupied Palestine all the way to occupied Iraq, to Kurdistan, Turkey, Iran and elsewhere -- and bring about a lasting or genuinely anti-imperialist solution. And it means combining all our collective strength to oppose this ugly war and to support the Lebanese and Palestinian people under siege. These high-tech murderers can create massive terror through their collective punishment in trying to achieve their aims, but they will never gain the confidence of the people of the Middle East. That is one problem they cannot solve. Distrust and hatred must be turned into a conscious political force aimed squarely at the entire unjust system of imperialism and its reactionary tentacles strangling the life out of poor and non-compliant populations. Only a revolutionary movement uniting the oppressed masses in the Middle East that rejects any form of obscurantist religious leadership and theocratic regimes, that seeks to break the hold of neo-colonial powers and their reluctant or willing puppet regimes strewn throughout the region as well as the imperialists’ outpost, Israel, has a fighting chance to end this nightmarish cycle of plunder, war and death.

Despite the imperialists’ attempts to numb people into inaction or fatalistic thinking that they are all-powerful because over and over they brazenly display new levels of brutal aggression against whole sections of humanity they consider disposable (or similarly try to suffocate opposition voices of the middle classes with layers of anaesthetising hypocrisy to justify one intolerable abuse after another), the law that “oppression breeds resistance” is one they cannot control. We must not give in one centimetre to their cynical calculations of either wearing down or repressing the people’s struggles.

New politics must come into being to lead the people’s revolutionary struggle – a new way of looking at how to change society, which classes are friends and which are enemies, who to rely on and what must be done to throw the imperialists out and stand up to its global hegemony; neither nationalism nor religion can accomplish this. The daily misery created by imperialism is constantly creating more of its gravediggers in the Middle East. While this potentially revolutionary social force exists, it does not yet have sufficient conscious and organised _expression -- and it must. This liberating breakthrough requires the proletarian internationalist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. From amongst those who hate this system and the unjust wars it generates, fighters and leaders need to dare to step forward and take up this challenge.

It is way past time to make common cause to confront the imperialists’ deadly arrogance with the conscious and powerful strength of the oppressed of the region whose interests lie in a totally different future, one that can only be wrested out of the current madness by developing revolution in countries throughout the region as part of the international struggle to bring down the vicious capitalist-imperialist system and usher in a whole new world.

Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
8 August 2006