War in Lebanon: A New Stage in Israel’s expansionist policy

An Israeli airstrike in the Dahiyeh neighborhood of Beirut on October 4, 2024. {credit: Hassan Ammar/AP}

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.


Having done their dirty work on the Gaza front, the Israeli army’s tanks have crossed the “blue line” that marks the border with Lebanon. Since the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000, this line has been marked by blue barrels placed on the border between the two countries by the United Nations. The Israeli army wants to take advantage of the impunity its allies have assured it since the outbreak of the war in Gaza a year ago to push its pawns into Lebanese territory. As it has done many times in the past: once in 1978, occupying a strip of Lebanese territory that it has since considered its “security zone”; a second time in 1982, pushing its troops into Beirut; then again in 2006, with a month-long bombardment of homes and infrastructure in Beirut’s southern suburbs, leaving a whole section of the capital in ruins.

A Dirty War Prepared With Impunity

Netanyahu bragged to the world about his impunity to wage war on all fronts, declaring before the 193-member United Nations General Assembly a few weeks ago that “Israel wants and calls for peace”, just as he launched his offensive against Lebanon, and at the same time signing an agreement with the United States for a new $8.7 billion military aid package.

Amid the deafening noise of raids and air raid sirens, American calls for a ceasefire have never been so hypocritical and criminal. In addition to the anger directed at the State of Israel, this anger is directed at the American ally who, despite the genocide in Gaza and the announced massacre in Lebanon, has been saying since October 7 that Israel “has the right to defend itself”.

The Israeli army’s ground operation in Lebanon comes on the heels of an air offensive that targeted Hezbollah’s base in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa (to the east) and the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing dozens of Shiite party officials, including Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, as well as the head of Hamas in Lebanon and militants from Jamaa Islamiya and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). More than 700 people were also killed in strikes on civilian infrastructure and in neighborhoods where the Israeli government said it suspected Hezbollah arms caches. These are in addition to the victims of the explosions of Hezbollah’s cell phones and walkie talkies by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, indiscriminately killing and wounding Hezbollah militants and civilians in their homes, workplaces or public places.

A Relentless Pursuit Since 1948

Lebanon did not take part in the wars between Israel and the Arab countries of the region that broke out after the foundation of Israel in 1948. But, without being a belligerent, Lebanon is nonetheless, in Israel’s eyes, “the last Israeli-Arab battlefield” as Lebanon and Syria expert Élisabeth Picard put it. In other words, Israel still looks at Lebanon as a military target after the separate peace agreements were made between Israel, Egypt and Jordan.

Indeed, it was to Lebanon that the greatest number of Palestinian refugees fled in the face of the advancing Israeli army when the State of Israel was created. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them poor, amassed in a dozen camps in Lebanon, where many of their descendants still live today. These refugee camps gave birth to a generation of Palestinian fighters, the fedayeen, who embodied a new hope for the Palestinians and the Arab masses after the defeats of the Arab armies by Israel. They were joined and strengthened in the early 1970s by thousands of Palestinian fighters fleeing the camps in Jordan after the “Black September” massacre, when 5,000 of them were killed by the Jordanian army and their fighting structures dismantled, and over the years by internally displaced people from the rural exodus and forced migration from southern and eastern Lebanon.

Lebanon, a Hotbed of Anti-Imperialist Protest

Lebanon is a highly unequal country where, even today, 1% of the population owns 60% of national wealth. Solidarity between poor populations and the Palestinian movement has always been strong, and the anti-imperialist currents of thought that were sweeping the world in the sixties and seventies were particularly influential.

In the April 1972 elections, the parties of the Lebanese left obtained an unprecedented score despite a voting system that was unfavorable to them, and they won a quarter of the seats in the Assembly. Their influence was also perceptible in the intensification of social struggles between 1972 and 1975, leading to no less than four general strikes during this period. These Marxist and pan-Arabist parties of the Lebanese left contested in unison the imperialist domination of the region, which had historically favored the Maronite and Druze communities. Imperialism also favored Israel, which had been its main ally since its creation in 1948. But they also contested the Lebanese political system, inherited from the French colonial power, whereby power is distributed between the self-proclaimed “elites” of the different religious communities according to their demographic weight. This concentrates power in the hands of the heads of the dominant families of each community.

In 1975, in the name of the interests of the most privileged part of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, the dominant Maronite Christian faction, far-right Christian militias began fighting against Lebanese left-wing organizations and the Palestinian militias. It was into this fighting, which led to fifteen years of civil war, that the Israeli army plunged when it invaded Lebanon in 1978. The pretext was too good for the various reactionary forces and their armed wings – the Christian militias, the Syrian army, which came to the aid of the Christian militias, and the Israeli army – to get rid of the Lebanese social revolt and the Palestinian fighters in one fell swoop.

Third War Against Lebanon

The Israeli army first entered Lebanon in 1978, to repel Palestinian fighters and establish a 700 km² buffer zone between the Israeli-Lebanese border and the Litani River. It is this zone that it has since considered to be a “security zone”, and which the current military offensive is designed at the very least to reconquer. The Israeli army has delegated the occupation of this zone to Lebanese mercenaries, whom it has equipped and structured to form the South Lebanon Army (SLA), in order to give the lie to the UN, whose 1978 resolution enjoined it to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon. At the height of its existence, this auxiliary army numbered 3,000 men, mainly Maronites and Shiites, who reigned terror in this strip of territory five to thirty kilometers wide, incarcerating and torturing almost 5,000 people, whether fighters for the Lebanese National Resistance Front (LNRF), Palestinian organizations, later Hezbollah, or ordinary inhabitants refusing their yoke.

This thinly veiled occupation of southern Lebanon did not prevent Israel from invading Lebanon again in 1982, sending more than twice the contingent mobilized in 1978 to storm Beirut. The stated aim of this macabre operation, dubbed the “Peace in Galilee” campaign, whose pretext was the attempted assassination in London of the Israeli ambassador by a Palestinian group dissident from Fatah, was once again to stop the attacks launched by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon.

Entrenched in Beirut, the PLO forces were no less formidable for the Israeli troops laying siege to the city. As soon as they entered Lebanon, the Israeli troops encountered resistance they had not expected, and many were casualties in the capture and, above all, occupation of Tyre, the major city in southern Lebanon. The many losses of Israeli soldiers, combined with the evidence that the invasion of Lebanon was not a defensive action, provoked huge demonstrations in Israel itself, under the aegis of the Peace Now organization: times were not the same as they are today. With Israel showing itself to be politically and partially militarily incapable of overcoming the Palestinian resistance, it was the Western imperialist powers, led by the United States and France, who intervened to put an end to the war. Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership agreed to be evacuated to Tunisia under the aegis of the Western powers. It has to be said that, while an alliance between the Palestinian resistance and the poor masses of Lebanon and the region could have opened up completely different prospects, Yasser Arafat declared: “Everything that is happening in Lebanon is unjustifiable. The Palestinian revolution, for its part, knows that the real field of conflict is not Lebanon. The battle is in Palestine, and that it can derive no benefit from a marginal battle that would divert it from its true path.”

The PLO’s departure for Tunisia left the Palestinian refugee camps defenseless. This was followed by the massacre of 3,500 to 5,000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September of the same year by far-right Christian militias, aided by Israeli troops who had surrounded the area and prevented the Palestinians from fleeing.

The crushing of the workers’ movement and the Lebanese left during the years of the Lebanese civil war, and the departure of Palestinian fighters, left the field somewhat free for this new communitarian political organization, Hezbollah, which presented itself as the defender of Lebanon’s poor masses, or more precisely those of the Shiite community (one of the country’s poorest).

Israeli troops did not completely withdraw from Lebanon until 2000, a withdrawal largely credited to Hezbollah. However, they relaunched a new offensive on Lebanese territory in July 2006, on the pretext of freeing two Israeli soldiers held by Hezbollah. For a month, the Israeli army bombarded the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing around a thousand people and destroying homes, infrastructure and industry on a massive scale, with reconstruction costing several billion dollars.

Creating a Buffer Zone in Southern Lebanon?

The plan to reestablish a military buffer zone in southern Lebanon was openly advocated by Israel’s far-right former Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, last January: for him, Israel should “reoccupy southern Lebanon for at least fifty years”. Is this project now being revived by Netanyahu, as much to monopolize part of the Litani River’s waters to irrigate Israeli land as to recreate a militarized zone under his complete control? We don’t know how far he intends to go.

We can expect nothing from the Western powers, who are incapable of getting Netanyahu to listen to us, even if they really want to. We’d like to see a part of Israel’s population finally expressing its displeasure. In 1982, demonstrations in Israel against the invasion of Lebanon and the refusal of hundreds of soldiers to obey played a major role in ending the siege of Beirut, as did the thousands of “refusals to serve” during the first intifada and another war in Lebanon, in 2006.

Today, these “refuseniks” are unfortunately far fewer in number. That they exist at all, despite the regime’s overwhelming propaganda and repression, is also the result of the Palestinians’ long struggle against Zionist colonialism.

In any case, given what we know about the role of the UN and its UNIFIL (the UN force in Lebanon) in the past, these are not the answer. Neither are the hypocritical appeals of the great powers for “moderation”. These things won’t be enough to put an end to the permanent state of war that the State of Israel is inflicting on the populations of Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Only the anger of the people will do that.

HIT US UP ON SOCIAL MEDIA