 Defeated Israeli Defense Forces leave Lebanon. Photo: Denis Sinyakov |
The failure of the Israeli military to achieve victory in its 34-day, U.S.-backed war against Lebanon has created a crisis in Israeli politics far out of proportion to the losses it suffered in the conflict. The death and destruction inflicted on Lebanon by 4,500 Israeli air strikes exceeded that suffered on the Israeli side by multiples of ten.
Yet, the outcome of the war was near-universally viewed—including inside Israel—as a sharp setback for the Israeli army.
The Lebanese resistance punched a hole in what Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky called in 1923 Israel’s “iron wall”—the widely held perception of Israeli military invincibility. Despite lacking an air force, navy and tanks, it fought the high-tech Israeli army to a standstill inside southern Lebanon, causing heavy casualties among the invaders. Such military reverses have been rare in Israel’s history.
That a relatively lightly armed guerrilla force could face off against the Israeli war machine was highly unexpected. The shock waves reverberated in Tel Aviv and Washington, which has provided Israel with tens of billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry over the years. U.S. leaders encouraged and supported the Israeli assault on Lebanon as an integral part of the U.S. drive to dominate the entire Middle East.
 Hezbollah leads massive reconstruction effort in south Lebanon. Photo: Hannah Allam/Mct |
The failure of the U.S.-Israeli attack to achieve its desired result of crushing Hezbollah and subduing Lebanon is a watershed event that has changed the political dynamics in the region. It has strengthened and energized all the anti-imperialist forces in the area.
At the same time, the possibility of a wider war is very real. The government of Ehud Olmert is under fire from the dominant right wing inside Israel for its conduct of the war. It may seek a new military campaign to recoup its standing.
Washington’s goal of domination remains unchanged. Israeli and U.S. leaders are united in wanting to deal a blow to the forces of resistance throughout the region.
The Sept. 3 edition of the Times of London carried an article headlined, “Israel Prepares for War with Iran and Syria.” The article quoted an “insider” in the Israeli military establishment as saying: “In the past we prepared for a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but Iran’s growing confidence after the war in Lebanon means we have to prepare for a full-scale war, in which Syria will be an important player.”
The relentless brutality with which it conducted the war against Lebanon, and similar tactics used against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, should open the eyes of people in the United States who still harbor the illusion that there is anything progressive or supportable about the state of Israel.
Zionism, colonialism and the ‘Iron Wall’
Since its beginnings in the late 19th century, the leaders of the Zionist movement shared a common goal: the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state. By the early 20th century they envisioned a large state that would include what is today Jordan, parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as present-day Israel.
For the new state to become a reality, the movement’s leaders knew they needed three elements: sponsorship by a major imperialist power; displacement of the indigenous Palestinian Arab inhabitants; and overwhelming military superiority—the “iron wall.”
Maintaining the “iron wall” has been a key element in the establishment and expansion of Israel as a colonial, settler state in the Middle East.
Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” doctrine was first put forward in a 1923 book of the same name. Leaders of Jabotinsky’s Betar movement included avowed supporters of the Italian fascist dictator, Mussolini.
The party gave birth to a number of self-proclaimed terrorist paramilitary organizations Irgun and Lehi—the Stern Gang—in the 1940s. Two future Israeli prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were among the groups’ leaders.
After the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Betar became the Herut party. Two decades later, Herut became the core of the Likud bloc, which emerged as the dominant force in Israeli politics in the 1970s.
Current Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was a member of the Betar movement as a youth in the early 1950s. He reportedly celebrated May Day by tearing down red flags from in front of the trade union office in the town where he lived.
The mainstream Zionist movement of the 1920s, 30s and 40s was led by David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir and other “Labor Zionists” who promoted a more diplomatic course and publicly disavowed the extreme racism and terrorism associated with Jabotinsky’s Revisionists.
But in the end, the “iron wall” became an integral and necessary part of Israeli ideology and strategy—precisely because Israel was a colonial implantation.
The Balfour Declaration and British sponsorship
Early Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann were well aware that settlement by itself could not produce an Israeli state. Their project also needed sponsorship and military protection from an imperialist power.
To the empires of Europe, the early Zionist leaders offered a proposition: support our project and the resulting state will serve your interests in the region. This quid pro quo was essential.
After attempts to interest the leaders of the Russian and Ottoman empires failed, the British Empire became the sponsor of the Zionist project with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. With British sponsorship and new sources of funding from the United States, the Zionist project took off after World War I.
Jewish settlements and land acquisition rapidly grew. Though now a British colony, a de facto government, the Jewish Agency, was set up in Zionist-controlled areas. It began building its own militia and, later, an army.
Following the colonial-settler pattern—like the one already established in the United States and South Africa—when the Zionists acquired an area, their aim was generally to make it exclusively Jewish. Zionist settlements or businesses were urged or required to hire only Jewish labor.
As the settler population increased from about 10 percent in the early 1920s to nearly 30 percent by the end of the 1930s, the discussion of “transfer” intensified. “Transfer” meant moving the indigenous Palestinian Arab population out of Palestine to make way for the future Israeli state.
The Palestinian population knew what was happening. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, there were numerous revolts against both British colonialism and Zionist settlement.
In 1936, Palestinians launched a general strike that lasted six months—the longest general strike ever—followed by nearly three years of guerrilla warfare. It was not until 1939, the year that World War II broke out in Europe, that the British army defeated the uprising. In the course of the struggle against the Palestinian Arabs, the British had aided—and were aided by—the Haganah, the armed wing of the Jewish Agency.
As a result of these developments, by the time World War II broke out, the Zionist forces had been greatly strengthened while the Palestinian side had been decimated.
The Zionists were emboldened and hoped to meet their goals quickly. The way to do this, they calculated, was by ethnic cleansing.
This policy was made clear in a 1940 statement by Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund: “Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country … and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, to transfer them all … we must not leave a single village, a single tribe.” (Quoted by Edward Said in “The Question of Palestine,” 1979)
Nazi genocide, World War II and Israel
David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first prime minister, said in 1939 that World War I had brought the Balfour Declaration; a second world war would result in the creation of a state. This was before the Nazi holocaust—the mass murder of 6 million Jews, along with millions of others killed because of their nationality, political beliefs, sexual orientation or disability.
The capitalist ruling classes in Western Europe and the United States paid little attention to the massacres of Jews and others while they were taking place. Riddled with anti-Semitism themselves, the western capitalist governments had viewed Nazi Germany before World War II as a club against their main enemy, the Soviet Union. They also regarded Germany as an ideal business climate, since the Nazis had crushed labor unions. It was only when Germany conquered most of Europe that their attitude changed.
During the war, the U.S. high command was so indifferent to people suffering in the Nazi death camps that they refused to bomb the rail lines that brought the boxcars crammed with victims into the camps. (Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died, 1968)
But after the war ended, U.S. leaders hypocritically channeled world sympathy for the suffering of the Jews and others into support for the creation of the Israeli state—at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians.
Overwhelmingly, the European Jewish survivors of World War II who wanted to leave Europe hoped to come to the United States. The Truman administration was opposed. The Cold War was getting underway and the U.S. ruling class viewed the European Jewish population as too radical and pro-communist.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine
 . Israel uses identity cards to enforce apartheid policies that discriminate based on religion and ethnicity. |
Under intense U.S. pressure, the United Nations passed Resolution 181 on Nov. 29, 1947, allocating 56 percent of historic Palestine to Israel. Forty-four percent was to go to the creation of a Palestinian state. Palestinians comprised 70 percent of the population at the time.
The U.N. vote was rigged by the United States; it was also illegal. The Palestinian population was not consulted about the fate of Palestine before the United Nations voted to partition the country.
In the war that followed, Israel, supported by European and U.S. imperialism, conquered 78 percent of Palestine. The Israeli military strategy included driving out as many Palestinians as possible. Despite their differences, the avowedly terrorist paramilitaries Irgun and Lehi were brought together with the Haganah under a unified military command.
What happened in 1948 is called the “War of Independence” by Israelis, and “Al Nakbah”—the catastrophe—by Palestinians. Nearly 90 percent of the Arab population was forcibly expelled from their homes and land.
The terrorists in Irgun and Lehi played a key role in the most thorough ethnic cleansing of the 20th century. In the early stages of the war, even when the Palestinian militias were defeated in battle, the Palestinian population would move to a nearby village but remain in the country waiting for the situation to calm down so they could return home.
Under Plan Dalet, implemented in April 1948, the Israeli military strategy changed to one of clearing the Arab population from areas that would become part of the Israeli state. Terror became the preferred method of “encouraging” the population to leave. The most infamous incident was the massacre of more than 110 residents of the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, at the hands of Begin’s Irgun.
The Zionist military broadcast threats to other Palestinian cities, towns and villages. They said, “Flee or the fate of Deir Yassin will be yours.” Zionist forces also claimed they possessed atomic bombs. The campaign was successful in spreading widespread panic.
More than 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their farms, shops and homes and forced into wretched concentration camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza and other places. The remaining 22 percent of Palestine was divided. The West Bank became part of Jordan; Gaza came under Egyptian administration.
Not one of the now 6 million Palestinian refugees has been allowed to return.
Many supporters of Israel portray its victory in 1948 as some kind of “miracle.” But in reality it was the “iron wall”—military supremacy combined with ruthless terror against the Palestinian civilian population—that made possible the creation of the new Israeli state.
Maintaining and increasing its military superiority has been the cornerstone of Israeli policy ever since.
