
This article is part of a series from the New Anticapitalist Party-Revolutionaries (NPA-R) in France, looking back at the situation in the Middle East over the past year. Originally published Oct. 4, 2024.
On the pretext of bringing home the 60,000 inhabitants of northern Israel who have been forced to take refuge elsewhere in the country to avoid Hezbollah rockets, the Israeli army has already condemned no less than a million Lebanese to a similar internal exile within Lebanon, or to Syria for some. At the time of this writing, Israel has begun its ground invasion operations in the south of the country, under the eye of the soldiers of UNIFIL, the UN force set up along the border in principle to prevent acts of war, but which allows troops to pass… always in the same direction: from Israel to Lebanon. Several hundred Lebanese civilians have already been killed in strikes that are surgical in name only, unless you confuse surgery with butchery. For almost a year now, Israel has been carrying out its genocidal massacre in Gaza, and every day mankind is witnessing how “civilization” generates the most abject barbarism – for example, the use of artificial intelligence to determine the targets of “probable Hamas militants” (the Israeli army itself estimates that, in at least 10% of cases, these targets have nothing to do with the Islamist organization) and when to strike these targets: when they return… to the family home.
The Western powers are well aware of the massacre in progress. Israel kept Washington informed of its ground operation just before it began. The staffs of the major Western powers, first and foremost the United States, are closely following the deployment of the latest military technologies against the Palestinian people, and now the Lebanese, as guinea pigs for imperialism’s future wars. This is just like what they do for the Russian and Ukrainian peoples in another theater of operation.
A Vital Military Partnership for Israel
Israel’s Western sponsors – led by the United States, but also France, the United Kingdom and Germany – not only provide diplomatic support, voting against every UN resolution condemning its actions, but also, quite simply, a supply of weapons: ammunition, but also specialized equipment, war electronics and even vehicles. Only Italy and Spain have assured us that they have suspended deliveries. But the arms trade is so opaque that it’s hard to know for sure. The United Kingdom played a certain bluff, announcing that it was suspending deliveries to Israel, before specifying that its’ suspension concerned 30 licenses… out of a total of 350.
During his trip to Canada, when protesters questioned his complicity in the ongoing massacre, French president Emmanuel Macron claimed that France does not sell arms to Israel. But it would be wrong to take his word for it. In fact, many flagships of the French arms industry (Thales, Safran, MDBA, Airbus…) have forged partnerships with their Israeli counterparts and are jointly developing their activities. Putting an end to this involvement would mean dismantling some of them, which out of the question for French arms capitalists.
Biden, for his part, has not only authorized arms sales and passed an emergency procedure to facilitate them, but has also given Israel unlimited access to stocks of munitions pre-positioned by its army in the Middle East, broken down munitions deliveries into more than a hundred operations to remove them from Congressional control and therefore from publicity, and pushed through several billion dollars in “Israel Defense” grants. Payment of the latest tranche, amounting to $8.7 billion, was confirmed by the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, last Thursday.
Israel Takes the Initiative, Confident of Unconditional Support from Western Powers
The United States and France have asked Israel, through the voices of Biden and Macron at the United Nations, to cease its military actions in Lebanon. But the Israeli government, while warning its Western backers of what it is going to do, is not asking them for a green light, and is ignoring their “demands”. All the more so as the declarations of the Western powers are not followed by the only thing that could force the Israeli leaders to halt their war policy: a halt to the delivery of armaments, supplied mainly by the United States, without which Israeli airspace would certainly not be inviolable and the army would quickly run out of those powerful bombs that have been sowing terror in Gaza for a year and now also in Lebanon.
Israel has certainly developed its own arms industry, and it’s firing on all cylinders. But it is unable on its own to supply drones, guns, tanks and aircraft with bombs and missiles at the level at which they are consumed.
Netanyahu thus overrode the Biden administration’s timid warnings, and even openly trampled on the semblance of “red lines” that the latter was half-heartedly trying to build. Biden warns of the risk of a full-scale war in the Middle East? But he and his vice president Kamala Harris hail the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a “measure of justice”.
Macron is playing a slightly different game. Continuing the policy of French imperialism, which since 1860 has ingeniously acted as sponsor of the Lebanese state, he makes solemn appeals for a ceasefire… but blames Hezbollah for the situation.
Of course, Biden and even more so Harris are weighing their statements with the November presidential election in mind. The aim is to avoid losing votes both among Jewish voters, who are predominantly pro-Israeli, and among young people and Democrats on the left who have taken up the cause against the genocide of the Palestinians.
But the embarrassment of the Western powers is no more explained by these domestic political considerations than by the fate of the peoples of the region, for whom they have no interest. They are alarmed by the risks that Netanyahu’s warmongering policy poses for the region. Iran and Hezbollah may at some point be adversaries for Israel and the Western powers. But their armed forces are also guarantors of social order. Israel’s leaders may think that the inhumane treatment they have imposed on the people of Gaza serves as a warning to all the peoples of the region, but it is by no means certain that this will prevent revolts. Indeed, in Iran, despite the repression, the simmering protest is still perceptible in the images of veiled women marching through the streets of Tehran. Elsewhere in the world, dictatorial regimes have been toppled by popular uprisings, as in Sri Lanka yesterday and Bangladesh today. The brute force deployed by Netanyahu may prove insufficient in the face of popular revolt. Fundamentally, it is this destabilization of state apparatuses used to repressing their own people that worries Western leaders.
The extreme right in power in Israel has, until now, succeeded in drawing them into a headlong rush that doesn’t necessarily suit them, but which they accept because they have no choice. The expansionist aims of the Israeli extreme right and its genocidal solution to the Palestinian question could well trigger the opposite reaction from the peoples of the region: a tenfold increase in anger. And this is exactly what worries the Western imperialist powers.