Hello friends, Matt here, fresh back from addressing a public forum here in Perth, Australia on the important topic of opposing the second Lebanon war. The casualty figures in this address are a little older in nature, but I think they get to the disproportinate nature of this conflict very well, where Lebanese civilians make up 90% of the casualties so far, 25 Lebanese to 1 Israeli civilian dead. Let me know what you think! ;) Am I being too sudden to say I doubt the ceasefire can last? Who Is Hezbollah? – Why Can’t The Cease-fire Work? On Saturday the misnamed Israeli Defence Force (IDF) pushed northwards towards the Litani river in Lebanon, breaking a cease-fire which is unworkable and losing 31 of their men themselves in the process. The Israelis claimed they were acting in "self-defence" - a ludicrous claim designed to justify the breaking of the cease-fire agreement, that only prohibits Israel from "offensive operations", which Israel has carried out with the support of the US and also of Prime Minister John Howard. Two days after the ceasefire took effect, Israeli army chief Dan Halutz said his troops could remain in Lebanon for months. So we arrive at a situation in which today the armed resistance group Hezbollah have pulled off one of the great feats of defensive warfare. The world's fourth largest army has been unsuccessful in any of it's stated aims - to free Israeli hostages and to disarm Hezbollah. Even the Christian population of Lebanon is known to be very supportive of this resistance group, headed by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who said in the early days of the war: "We are not a classic army extending from the sea to Mt Hermon. We are a popular and serious resistance movement that is present in may areas and axes. Our equation and principles are the following: When the Israelis enter, they must pay dearly in terms of their tanks, officers, and soldiers. That is what we pledge to do and we will honor our pledge, God willing". And so far that’s been a very successful tactic. So who then are Hezbollah, what role do they play in the modern-day history of Lebanon? Our Prime Minister John Howard has described Hezbollah as a "terrorist organisation", and that we must support the "Lebanese government" over Hezbollah during a speech he made at a Liberal Party state conference on July 29th, at the Hyatt Hilton Hotel here in Perth. But Hezbollah are far from a small unpopular terrorist group. Their name means "the party of God" in Arabic and they have already sent Israeli forces packing from Southern Lebanon in 2000, having been formed out of Shia Muslims in 1982. The interesting part about this period of time is that originally the Shia Muslim communities in Lebanon welcomed the Israeli forces as liberators, but were badly mistreated by them. The Shia suffered both from the Lebanese army and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which deliberately ran operations from Shia territories in Southern Lebanon. Now Israel wants their allied Turkish troops in these areas! Earlier on, the US pushed for peacekeepers from Sunni Egypt. Lebanon is 40% Shia in population, mostly in South Lebanon. Hezbollah are a product of a religious sectarian system where the Shia are the losers rather than the winners. Nasrallah was raised in the slums of East Beirut, where there is appalling poverty and where there were Christian massacres during the Lebanon civil war of 1975-90. In the country's 2005 democratic elections, Hezbollah's bloc became the second-largest in parliament (35 out of 128), and took all 23 seats in the south. The elections resulted, for the first time, in Hezbollah's representation in Lebanon's cabinet, with two members.Its civilian arm runs hospitals, charities, news services and educational facilities. Its social services programmes are very popular with the Shia community (40% of Lebanon’s population). The EU and UN did not consider Hezbollah a terrorist organisation at the outbreak of hostilities. While the USA did, a 2002 Congressional Research Service report and the most recent State Department report on international terrorism (2005) say that no acts of terrorism have been attributed to Hezbollah since 1994. Although it has been accused of attacks on civilian targets abroad, there is no evidence of this. Recent Hezbollah rocket attacks in Northern Israel do however fall within the definition of using indiscriminate violence for political gain - or terrorism. It should be noted that unlike other past leftist National Liberation Movements, Hezbollah support the private ownership of wealth and willingly seek funds from privately run businesses. Although it ended the ban on Palestinian refugees right to work in Lebanon, and supports poor peasants, it remains a capitalist organisation, and while socialists give their unconditional support to the resistance movement, we must also not be too uncritical of their economic and social policies. It's important that we recognise then that Hezbollah's formation was as much political as military, it's not just some kind of "terrorist organisation" that Howard depicts it as. It's a National Liberation Movement, as the following recent statement from Nasrallah makes plain: "As long as there is Israeli military movement, Israeli field aggression, and Israeli soldiers Occupying our land, it is our natural right to fight them and defend our lands, our homes,and ourselves." Also from Sheik Nasrallah: “To confront this accursed plan, to thwart the goals of this war, to fight the battle to liberate, what remains of our land and our prisoners, I state categorically under no circumstances will we accept any term that is insulting to our country, our people, or our resistance. We will not accept any formula at the expense of the national interest, national sovereignty and national independence, especially after all these sacrifices, no matter how long the confrontation lasts and no matter how numerous the sacrifices may be. Our main and true slogan is “Honor First”. Nasralla is calling on all social classes, all religious groups, to support Hezbollah with constant appeals for "national unity". In the eyes of most of the Arab world, including the US allies in Eygpt, Jordan, Iraq, and even Saudi Arabia there has been widespread criticism of Israel for starting the war, and criticism of their leaders not publicly backing Hezbollah far enough. Before it publicly announced it's existence in 1985, Hezbollah was more of a loose coalition than a party. Secretary-General Sheik Hassan Nasrallah became the leader in 1992, at the request of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The party is known to also be closely linked to Syria, as with another Shia political party called Amal. In July 2005 Hezbollah gained their first cabinet post, with the appointment of Energy Minister Mohammad Fneish as well as a Minister of Labor. Their armed wing is called the Islamic Resistance. One of Hezbollah's major aims was to gain back the Sheeba Farms, a group of 14 farms which were Lebanese for generations, then were taken by Syria, until Israel occupied them in 1967. UN resolutions 425 and 426 both demand Israel hand over ownership of the Sheeba Farms to Lebanon. Syria also supports Lebanese ownership of this very fertile and productive land. Israel's claims that it is acting in "self-defence" and to "punish Hezbollah" have been criticised by Lebanon's Christian President, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches and international jurists - Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, says: "To treat border incidents, involving a few casualties from rockets and the abduction of a single Israeli soldier by a Gazan militia and two by Hezbollah in south Lebanon, as if it were an occasion of war is a gross distortion of well-accepted international law and state practice. To justify legally a claim of self-defense requires a full-scale armed attack across Israeli borders. If every violent border incident or terrorist provocation were to be so regarded as an act of war, the world would be aflame." Hezbollah expressed surprise when their kidnapping of Israeli troops was reciprocated with the bombing of Lebanon. In the past, groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have used kidnapped Israelis for prisoner exchanges with the Israeli government. On 1 August, Lebanese Christian religious leaders – including the patriarchate of the Maronite church, the country's largest Christian community – denounced Israel's "war crimes," called on "the international community to halt the aggression...and lift the unjust [Israeli] blockade," and "hailed the resistance, mainly led by Hezbollah which represents one of the sections of society." The disproportionate nature of casualties was revealed just before the ceasefire, which will no doubt lead to more bodies being found under the rubble of towns and villages in South Lebanon. Long-time Beirut journalist Robert Fisk described the scene of destroyed villages as similar to that of France in World War One. According to the Arab-English Media Watch website before the ceasefire: • Of the 1,181 people killed in Lebanon so far, at least 1,064 of them (90%) are Lebanese civilians, of which a third are children. • Despite Israel's precision weaponry, only 5% of deaths (60) are Hezbollah. • 4,051 Lebanese civilians have been wounded, including 1,000 children (25%), and almost a million displaced, including half a million children (more than a quarter of the population). • The UN and Lebanese army have also been targeted, despite Israeli demands for the army to reign in Hezbollah, and despite the fact that the army has not attacked Israel. • During the same period, 160 Israelis have been killed, of which 73% (117) are military and almost half of the civilian deaths are Arab. 25 times as many Lebanese civilians have been killed than Israeli. • Up to 30,000 homes have been destroyed in Lebanon, making well over 100,000 homeless. For example, in the village of Tayyabah 80% of homes have been destroyed, 50% in Markaba and Qantarah, and 30% in Mays al Jabal. As John Pilger wrote in an article called “Empire In Israel”: “There is never mention that, just as the rise of Hamas was a response to the atrocities and humiliations the Palestinians have suffered for half a century, so Hezbollah was formed only as a defence against Ariel Sharon's murderous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which left 22,000 people dead. There is never mention that Israel intervenes at will, illegally and brutally, in the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine, having demolished 11,000 homes and walled off people from their farmlands, and families, and hospitals, and schools. There is never mention that the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, and the true enemy of its people is not the Arabs, but Zionism and an imperial America that guarantees the Jewish state as the antithesis of humane Judaism.” These figures make John Howard's argument that Israel is trying to punish Hezbollah quite ridiculous. What this war is really about is the US and Israel trying to isolate Iran and Syria, an objective stated publicly by Condoleezza Rice, as well as having a pro-US government in place in Lebanon, or at the very least leave the Lebanese weak and economically depressed. The Israeli/US plans for the composition of peacekeepers show a divide and rule outlook towards the predominately Shia Muslim Lebanese. What does Lebanese history tell us about the Lebanon War today? Ever since the 1919 peace conference in Paris, the Zionist league have always sought to gain the confidence of the Lebanese Christian - called the Maronite - community, thinking they would co-operate in return for protection. In 1954 and 1955 David Ben-Guiron the Israeli Prime Minister wanted to invade Lebanon, claiming that Syria was so weak Israelis could just walk on in! In 1958 the United States sent in an occupation force, supposedly to protect the democratically elected government, though probably more to gain a pro-Israel regime. The Israelis allied themselves with Christian Phalagist militia in the Lebanese Civil War, and were heavily repulsed during their invasion of the country in 1978. However, Israeli forces once more invaded in 1982 and were not fully expelled until 2000. They continue to illegally occupy the Sheeba Farms, and President Ehud Olmert has said that he will not "negotiate" about this. So we see a pattern of constant Israeli and US intervention in the affairs of Lebanon, which was once a prosperous and friendly, multicultural place noted for it’s detachment from the usual Middle Eastern violence prior to the events of 1975. According to Uri Avenery, a former member of the Israeli Knesset (or Parliament) and veteran peace activist in a recent article land rights are central to this war: "The war against the Palestinian people is being waged in order to keep the "settlement blocs" and annex large parts of the West Bank. The war in the North was waged, in fact, to keep the settlements on the Golan Heights." And he also explains the need for Israeli action on giving the Golan Heights back to Syria: "Without the cooperation of Syria, Iran has no direct way of supplying Hezbollah with arms. The solution is on hand: we have to remove the settlers from there, whatever the cost in wines and mineral water, and give the Golan back to its rightful owners. Ehud Barak almost did so,but, as is his wont, lost his nerve at the last moment." An important late development in Lebanese history was the "Cedar Revolution", where thousands took to the streets after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in support of Resolution 1559, calling for the withdrawal of Syrian forces and the disarming of Hezbollah. The 14,000 Syrian troops reluctantly left in March 2005. UN Resolution 1559 was adopted after the US Congress passed the Syria Accountability Act of 2003, representing a victory for the Zionist lobby. Bush jnr even supported sanctions against Syria, proving the USA’s belligerent intentions. The Syrians have a history of backing Hezbollah the past 15 years or so, perhaps to keep Israeli troops occupied on the South Lebanon border, and also to pressure the Israeli’s to return the Sheeba Farms. UN Resolution 1701 was adopted on August 11, and has met with protests yet acceptance by both Hezbollah, the Lebanese government and most of the Arab world. It provides no compensation for civilians whose lives have been destroyed, and the continuing blockade of Beirut’s port and Airbase are in direct contravention of the resolution. The idea of "disarming Hezbollah" would only invite Civil War, and the Israeli Defence Force may wait around for a long time before they leave Lebanon as Resolution 1701 only takes effect once Lebanese and UNIFIL troops are deployed, which can only happen when hostilities cease. Nobody can say how long this process will last. So as we can see, Hezbollah may need to be around for a long time, especially with all the new recruits they are gaining as a result of their military success. There is plenty of evidence that the United States and Israel planned the second Lebanon war well in advance, with huge increases in Israeli defence spending over the past year, especially through the US friendly client state of Georgia. With continuing US threats to Iran and Syria, it is vital we build up the anti-war movement at this present time, to avoid the Middle Eastern map being re-made in a capitalist direction. Prime Minister Howard also mentioned at the conference that “a lasting peace can only be based upon an unconditional acceptance by everybody of the two-state solution”. The success of the Hezbollah resistance suggests a protracted and difficult war, and socialists throughout the world are calling for revolutionary unity, which means we go beyond the two-state solution, showing our support for the resistance while at the same time critically supporting the peace movement in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, and also in Israel, where the success of Hezbollah and the high Israeli casualty rate has sparked the setting up of a parliamentary inquiry, as indeed there was after the first Lebanon war and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. We need to turn the religious and sectarian divide into a class based one - It’s up to peace activists to keep the heat on the Howard government as well, reminding the people that the bosses ‘war on terror’ has indeed been truly lost. Howard’s foreign policy is tied up with the US, and the events in Lebanon have every potential of discrediting him and Bush as well.
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