Iran, Hezbollah Attacks on Israel Set Back Palestinian Cause

By Geoff Mirelowitz and Argiris Malapanis

On October 1, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Lebanon, the fourth time Israel has done so since 1978.

The ground invasion followed a brazen Israeli escalation of its war with Hezbollah: exploding personal electronic devices, intense airstrikes, and the assassination of an array of Hezbollah leaders, including the group’s general secretary Hassan Nasrallah. The battle began when Hezbollah launched a steady campaign of missiles directed at Israel — and Israel responded in kind — after the IDF invaded Gaza last October.

At the same time, Israel’s war on Gaza grinds on — with more than 41,000 killed, tens of thousands of others injured, and the displacement of nearly the entire population of 2.3 million in the territory. IDF and settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have also escalated over the last year, as Palestinian land continues to be expropriated there at an increased pace.

“Israel is waging a campaign of terror and destruction that has brought the entire region ever closer to a state of all-out war,” Jewish Voice for Peace wrote in The Wire. “This week,” it continued, “Israel bombed Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen in a single day.”

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Hours after the invasion of Lebanon, Iran launched 181 ballistic missiles at Israel, escalating the shadow war between the two countries. Tehran said it was retaliating for the assassination of Nasrallah, a key Iranian ally, a top Iranian commander who was with him, and Israel’s earlier assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was in Tehran in July.

Israel reported one death from the Iranian attack, ironically a Palestinian, Sameh al-Asali, near Jericho in the West Bank.

In contrast, Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed at least 1,263 people in the country since mid-September and displaced nearly one million.

Danger of further escalation

Israel declared it will answer Iran’s attack. “We have the capabilities to reach and strike any point in the Middle East,” said IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi on October 2.

Tehran said it too will respond if Israel retaliates. Speaking in Doha alongside Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani on October 2, Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian said, “We were left with no choice but to respond. If Israel wants to react, we will have a stronger response, this is what the Islamic Republic is committed to.”

Any further such escalation poses terrible dangers for working people in the Middle East and the world.

The Biden administration signaled its full support for Israel in words and deeds. Following consultations with government leaders in the Group of 7 (G7) — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States — Biden said all those on the call agreed that Israel had the right to respond to Iran’s military assault, the New York Times reported.

The U.S. has 40,000 troops deployed across the Middle East, announced the New York Times on October 2. “The Pentagon was preparing to send thousands more U.S. troops, including three additional aircraft squadrons, to the Middle East,” the article reported. “That highlighted the scale of the American military presence in a region where war appears to be spreading.”

At the same time, in a comment reflecting Washington’s concern that this wider war can quickly spiral completely out of its control, Biden said he opposes any Israeli plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Asked by a reporter, he replied, “The answer is no. All seven of us [G7] agree that they have a right to respond, but they have to respond in proportion.”

Whether Israel will pay any more attention to Biden’s advice now than it has over the past year remains to be seen.

As the Times reported September 29, “Apart from briefly freezing one shipment of arms, Washington has rarely followed its criticism with practical consequences, continuing to provide Mr. Netanyahu’s government with diplomatic cover at the United Nations and billions of dollars’ worth of arms. Israel has strong bipartisan support in the United States, with both Democratic and Republican leaderships wary of criticizing Israeli policy, particularly in the run-up to the presidential election.”

Biden has hardly been a consistent advocate of Israeli moderation. A formal White House statement following Nasrallah’s assassination declared, “His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”

Such hypocrisy poses the question: Who else is entitled to exact “a measure of justice” for the many victims of U.S. wars abroad or Israel’s ongoing carnage — enabled by weapons from Washington — in Gaza and elsewhere?

Hezbollah and Iran hamper Palestinian cause

The missiles launched against Israel by Hezbollah and Iran have done nothing to materially or politically aid the Palestinian people. Not a single such rocket in the past year has restrained the IDF in Gaza or the West Bank.

To the contrary, these attacks offered Israel a pretext for spreading that carnage now to Lebanon. In escalating its response to Hezbollah’s missile campaign prior to its invasion, Israel has waged “one of the most intense air raids in modern warfare,” the Times reported September 24.

As World-Outlook has previously explained, Iran’s “pro-Palestinian rhetoric is part of its efforts to prop up its own influence among Iranians — and others — who sympathize with the Palestinian struggle.” The article documented Iran’s role in establishing Hezbollah and the reactionary politics shared by the Iranian regime and its ally in Lebanon.

“Hezbollah,” it explained, “is a Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon with a large military wing. It was established by Lebanese clerics as part of the opposition to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It adopted the name Hezbollah (‘The Party of Allah,’ or ‘The Party of God’) chosen by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader at the time.

“Some 1,500 Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps instructors were instrumental in creating the organization by helping unify various Shiite groups. In the last 15 years, Hezbollah has succeeded in electing a large number of deputies to Lebanon’s parliament. Its military wing is recognized as a legitimate armed force in the country.

“Hezbollah aims at establishing a theocratic Islamic regime in Lebanon like that in Iran. One of the group’s main goals is the destruction of the state of Israel. The organization claims it is anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. But its leaders loudly deny the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews during World War II and have often expressed antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

In After Nasrallah, an article in this month’s London Review of Books, the magazine’s U.S. editor Adam Shatz documents Hezbollah’s political development, including its “intervention in the Syrian war on behalf of the [Bashar] Assad dictatorship” that “helped preserve the Assad regime.”

Nasrallahs’s forces “had targeted soldiers in its fight against Israel but appeared to make no attempt to avoid civilian casualties in its scorched earth campaign in Syria,” Shatz explained. “Not only did Hizbullah lose thousands of fighters: the party of resistance was now the party of counterinsurgency against fellow Arabs.”

This is evidence that Hezbollah was created primarily to advance the goals of the Iranian theocracy in the region. Maintaining a dictatorial regime in power in neighboring Syria keeps a land corridor free for easy flow of funds, weapons, military advisers, and other personnel to and from Iran. Claims of defending the Palestinian cause, or the Arab masses, are simply window dressing.

Palestinian self-determination: the central issue

The most recent events have posed the genuine danger of an even wider regional war that could spread beyond the Middle East.

However, the central political issue is the same posed since 1948, and earlier: the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

The New York Times alluded to this in its September 29 article following Nasrallah’s assassination. “The killing of Lebanese leaders in Lebanon,” it wrote, “will not resolve Israel’s longest-running challenge: its conflict with the Palestinians, who still seek a sovereign state regardless of Mr. Netanyahu’s moves against Hezbollah.”

It cited Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Israeli lawmaker, who, in a social media post said, “Israeli governments have been carrying out assassinations for decades. It did not promote security and did not stop any war.”

Fawaz A. Gerges, a Lebanese American professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, underlined this point in The Rising Risk of a New Forever War.

“The ‘total victory’ that Mr. Netanyahu and his cabinet are seeking over Hezbollah will not bring the absolute security that Israelis want and need,” wrote Gerges. “Whenever Israel decides to stop its military campaign, what will remain are millions of traumatized Arabs who have watched their brothers and sisters in Palestine and Lebanon be slaughtered with gruesome impunity. These feelings won’t easily subside.

“If unresolved,” Gerges continued, “the underlying conditions that gave rise to the current conflict — the Israeli government’s subjugation of Palestinians and denial of an independent Palestinian state — will only foster the conditions for further conflict. Under such circumstances, Israel will be continually confronted with hardened fighters who have been radicalized by the suffering it has imposed.”

Israel out of Lebanon & Gaza. End U.S. aid to Israel.

The most immediate step necessary is an end to Israeli aggression starting with the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and Lebanon. Those supporting the Palestinian quest for self-determination should also demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel — aid indispensable for the war the IDF is escalating in the region.

Enormous worldwide sentiment exists for a ceasefire in Gaza. That urgent need has been eclipsed by Israel’s escalation of the war in Lebanon, Iran’s decision to directly attack Israel for the second time this year, and the threat of even wider war.

Above all, the Palestinian people need both breathing and political space that is precluded today by the war. That space is needed for economic and social reconstruction as well as for developing a new leadership and new strategy.

As Palestinian American professor Rashid Khalidi explained in a May interview in Jacobin, reprinted by World-Outlook:

“There has to be a fundamental reorganization of the Palestinian national movement. And there has to be a unified consensus among Palestinians. This is a Palestinian problem. Israel, on the other hand, has to overcome its obsession with force when dealing with the Palestinians. It has to overcome the idea that there’s only one people with a right to self-determination in Israel.”

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