Stand with Lebanon

Lotta Soph and TK Adisa comment on the Zionist escalations against Lebanon, and offer thoughts for how the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain can respond.

Israel has massively ramped up attacks on Lebanon. Monday was the deadliest day in the war since October. As we said before, talk about ‘potential’ for regional war is out of the window – this is regional war. 

Although mainstream media outlets in the West praised last week’s pager attack for how supposedly ‘precise’ it was, at least 559 people, at least 50 children, have been killed and 1,835 wounded according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

As Israeli forces prepare for a ground invasion into Lebanon, the Palestine movement must be clear and firm in its solidarity with the people of Lebanon as they try to survive and resist this onslaught.

People are desperately seeking shelter and refuge away from the border, but Israeli strikes have targeted villages, towns and cities all across the country in over 1600 bombings. The claim that these are all confirmed Hezbollah military targets is a lie. Some of the people displaced this week are Palestinian refugees already displaced by settler colonial violence over generations.

The Israeli military said on Tuesday: ‘We will continue to operate at full strength. We will accelerate offensive actions today and reinforce all units.’ Yesterday Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi said ‘Go in, destroy the enemy there, and go destroy the infrastructure.’

Israel’s military and political establishment are using many of the same tactics as they do in Gaza: text messages telling people they have to leave the area before bombing exit roads and medical centers, calling Lebanese people ‘human shields’ for Hezbollah militants, and even going beyond that to say that Lebanon and Hezbollah are the same thing.

Netanyahu has several aims here: to push for the West to rally further behind Israel, to win back safe territory for the settlers of the North that are part of his support base (possibly by creating a buffer zone through brutal occupation of Southern Lebanon) and finally to prolong the war that is the only thing keeping him in power at this point.

What will happen now?

Even if Israel immediately stops attacking Lebanon, the human cost of this will be huge in loss of life, displacement of people and damage to roads, hospitals and schools, in a country that has been in financial crisis for years. But they’re not going to immediately stop.

A serious armed conflict involving Hezbollah and Israeli military in the south of Lebanon could serve Netanyahu’s project, especially if Iran gets involved, by escalating things enough to lock in US and Western support while pushing the frontier of the conflict away from Israeli territory. 

Netanyahu has long tried to frame Iran as the source of evil in the region, and has attempted to construct a narrative that poses Iran ‘and its proxies’ as an existential threat to not only Israel, but the West too and the US in particular. The description of all anti-Zionist resistance forces as Iranian proxies is maintained despite October 7th being a project of the Palestinian resistance alone, and despite many groups, particularly in Palestine and Yemen, demonstrating significant strategic autonomy from Iran. 

The aim of the lie is to bring the US into a war with Iran, which Israel imagines will lead to a decisive defeat of the Axis of Resistance and bring long-term security for the Zionist project. While Hezbollah is indeed supported by Iran, the function of the ‘proxy’ framing is to whip up support for war with Iran.

America is the only power that could end this quickly, but has proven before that it will allow people – Lebanese or Palestinian – to be massacred by Israel with impunity. But there are still lots of things we can do, we have to do, to stand with Lebanon and Palestine. 

What do we do?

By attacking Lebanon, the Israeli state has politically and diplomatically extended itself even further than it has been able to over the past year of genocide.

It’s likely the military wants to go in, do as much damage to Hezbollah as possible, and establish a buffer zone they control in the South of Lebanon without getting bogged down the way they did in Gaza. If they are trying to act quickly it is to outpace the international backlash that would follow these new war crimes. We must not let them. 

The Palestine movement needs to grasp this moment. Our role is to:

• expose the racism and lies told by the Israeli government, and repeated or backed up by western media and politicians, about what they are doing in Lebanon
• refuse to let new massacres and atrocities become normalised or be swept under the rug. In whatever context you are able to, amplify the voices of Lebanese and Palestinian people struggling against settler colonial violence to build anti-Zionist sentiment here in Britain
• demand full support and safe routes for Lebanese and Palestinian asylum seekers and refugees
• renew existing demands and heighten pressure on the British state to oppose the genocide in Palestine and invasion of Lebanon at every level
• use trade union structures to pass motions and win support for the above
• continue fighting for more sanctions and embargoes now with all the diversity of tactics the movement has used so far, from direct action disrupting the supply of arms to the Israeli military to mass protest
• fight for an end to British involvement in this war. Our military is bombing Yemen to relieve one of the fronts of the war, and has killed children in airstrikes. While the mainstream press is silent about this we should be shouting it from the rooftops. 

News websites are talking about the risk of Lebanon becoming ‘another Gaza’, and being ‘on the brink’. But there is no brink. Israeli forces have shown there is no line they won’t cross. They showed that all year in Palestine, they showed that in the 2006 war, in their occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s, and through all the decades since the Nakba. We have to draw from the deep history of steadfastness in resistance to Zionist occupation now and do everything we can to stop this.

Stand with Lebanon. Stand with Palestine.