After two weeks of the Israeli offensive in Lebanon, the battles on the border and the destructure of the infrastructure continue with the deliberate goal of terrorizing the civilian population. As this scandal unfolds, Condoleeza Rice began her diplomatic tour aiming to gain more time for the Israeli army to continue using US bombs and weapons to devastate Lebanon, while grandstanding on a search for a “permanent and sustainable” cease-fire. During her journey, she began to talk more insistently about the formation of an international peace-keeping force that would take on the difficult task of preventing new Hezbollah attacks or that would collaborate with the Lebanese army to do it. Though many doubt the viability for Israel of these alternatives for containing the threat of Hezbollah, one shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that after a cease-fire Israel would seek to impose some type of international intervention.

Nevertheless, it’s not yet clear when this moment will arrive. In the first days of its military campaign,
Israel enjoyed wide international backing which opened a window of opportunity to qualitatively weaken Hezbollah, a point which was supported by the US in its effort to extricate itself from the strategic impasse it faces in the region as a consequence of the military quagmire in Iraq. However, as the images of the destruction of infrastructure and the enormous suffering of the Lebanese (and Palestinian) masses spread, that support has been deteriorating. Once again, Israel is under strong international pressure, along with its master, the US. Let’s not forget that the Bush administration remains politically weak. In this context, even though the US would like to push
ahead toward the defeat of Hezbollah, the poll numbers and the growing problems in Iraq prevent the US from supporting Israel indefinitely. These are the conditions that make the introduction of an international intervention force worthwile. The US wants breathe life, at least provisionally, into an option that the Israeli army, frightened by the high costs and fatal consequences of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, has not been willing to consider. This is why, at the same time as we redouble our efforts to defeat Israel’s military offensive, we must make clear our complete opposition to the deployment of any military force, whether under the command of the UN or NATO, on Lebanese soil. A conclusive military victory for Israel, or, if this is not possible, the introduction of an imperialist military force in a buffer zone on the Israel-Lebanon border, would be a defeat for the masses of the region who only want to shake off the Israeli hegemony backed up by the moneyand arms of US imperialism.

With this perspective we revolutionaries fight to destroy the source, since its creation, of oppression and permanent wars in the region: the state of Israel, a state founded on the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population and a state that can only maintain itself on the basis of permanent war and oppression against the Palestinian masses and the neighboring Arab countries, as its entire history demonstrates. Because of this state of war, despite the political character of Hezbollah, we revolutionaries defend Hezbollah against the aggression of the zionist state and we consider its acts of resistance against the terrorist Israeli state legitimate, at the same time as we maintain complete political independence from this radical islamic group. We are for the defeat of the Israeli aggression against Lebanon, which, if it were to succeed, would only establish a more pro-imperialist government which would most likely accept a major imperialist “peace-keeping” intervention, once the Israeli army had cleared the way. Only a revolutionary workers leadership, independent of all the bourgeois governments of the region, not only the the friends of Israeli but also those that today seem to be its enemies as is the case of Syria and Iran, can be an alternative for the just aspirations of the masses of the region. We marxist revolutionaries fight for the destruction of the state of Israel and insist that a secular, democratic, and non-racist Palestine is only possible as a socialist and workers Palestine, where Arabs and Jews can live together in peace, on all the historic territory of Palestine (Israel proper and the current Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza), as part of a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East.