Getty Images/Uriel Sinai

Israeli armored column crosses into southern Lebanon July 25 near Israeli city of Avivim. Tel Aviv has expanded its bombing campaign and ground invasion of Lebanon.

Representatives of 18 governments and others at a Middle East conference in Rome today did not come to an agreement on such a deployment. Many have stated their support for some kind of “peacekeeping” force.

Israeli forces have killed nearly 400 in Lebanon and driven more than 600,000 people from their homes since the assault began two weeks ago. Tel Aviv aims to crush Hezbollah, a Lebanese group that organized armed resistance to an earlier Israeli occupation of the country. Hezbollah militias captured two Israeli soldiers, killed three, and wounded two in a July 12 attack, which the Israeli rulers used as the pretext for their assault.

Outrage among working people worldwide over the devastation of Lebanon has been reflected in a growing number of protests, from predominantly Arab countries to North America and within Israel itself. More than 2,500 marched in Tel Aviv July 22 calling for a halt to the war on Lebanon. (See article in this issue.)

Washington—the Israeli rulers’ most powerful patron—continues to provide political backing for the assault and has moved to rapidly resupply the Israeli war machine. The July 22 New York Times reported that the U.S. government “is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel.” The weaponry is central to the aerial assault of the Israeli air force, whose officials said Tel Aviv’s fighter jets dropped 23 tons of explosives three days earlier on Beirut alone.

In the days leading up to the ground invasion, Israeli forces dropped flyers over southern Lebanon telling the civilian population to flee the area. But the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has bombed hundreds of the roads and bridges that would make escape possible. The London Financial Times reported July 25, for example, that the main highway between the southern city of Sidon and Beirut further north was made impassable by an Israeli missile barrage on the first day of the war.

Even when Lebanese left the center of the war zone they were far from safe. With an estimated 40,000 refugees in a city of 100,000, Sidon itself came under attack from fighter-bombers for the first time on July 23.

“For Israel, there are no longer civilians in southern Lebanon,” said Israel’s justice minister, Haim Ramon.  
 
‘Destroy the infrastructure’
In the early days of the assault, the IDF sent small groups of soldiers into southern Lebanon for short-term operations while it massed equipment and troops on the border. Israel’s defense minister, Amir Peretz, announced that his troops would establish an occupation over a section of Lebanese territory. “We are shaping it, but you can’t draw a single line that will become a permanent line along the entire zone,” he said. Israeli forces occupied a 15-mile-deep area there from 1982 to 2000.

As the ground offensive began Tel Aviv called up 5,000 reservists into active duty.

The Israeli army reportedly overran the Lebanese village of Maroun al-Ras July 22-23, about a mile from the border. Since that time it has been engaged in combat with Lebanese fighters for control over the larger city of Bint Jbail, with a population of 200,000.

The IDF is using an intense artillery barrage to conquer Bint Jbail. The Israeli commander of an artillery battalion told the Jerusalem Post July 25 that cannons from his unit in northern Israel had fired 3,000 shells at the city in the last few days. “The operation in Bint Jbail, initially slated to take 48-72 hours, would last as long as necessary to kill all the Hizbullah terrorists and destroy the infrastructure,” the Post reported from Israeli military officials.

The Israeli assault began July 13 with artillery fire, air strikes, and a naval bombardment of southern Lebanon. Israeli forces then imposed a sea, air, and naval blockade of the country, with continued bombardments of predominantly Shiite sections of Beirut and southern Lebanon, and assassination attempts against Hezbollah officials.

Hezbollah has fired more than 2,000 rockets into northern Israel since the Israeli attack began. One-third of the area’s 2 million residents have fled, the Wall Street Journal reported July 24, and “Haifa now resembles a ghost town.” The Haifa port, one of the country’s two busiest, has been shut down for a week. About 40 Israelis have died in the attacks.  
 
‘Strategic opening’ for imperialism
From the first day of the assault Washington brushed aside calls by the Lebanese government and others to press the Israeli rulers to halt their attacks and establish a cease-fire. “I believe sovereign nations have the right to defend their people from terrorist attack, and to take the necessary action to prevent those attacks,” U.S. president George Bush said in a July 22 radio address.

The same day the New York Times reported that the White House had signed off on a rush shipment of precision-guided bombs to Tel Aviv. “An arms-sale package approved last year provides authority for Israel to purchase from the United States as many as 100 GBU-28’s, which are 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs,” the Times reported. “The package also provides for selling satellite-guided missiles.”

While in Israel July 25, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said she supported an end to the fighting, but only once there is a way “to deal with the causes of extremism.”

Governments in the Middle East have adopted a range of views, from criticism of the “extremism” of Hezbollah to condemnation of the Israeli assault.

On July 19 Iraq’s prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said, “The Israeli attacks and air strikes are completely destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure. I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions.”

At that summit, however, Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal placed at least equal blame on Hezbollah. He said the group’s actions “will pull the whole region back to years ago, and we cannot accept them.”

A July 24 Wall Street Journal editorial titled, “Condi’s Mideast Mission,” notes that the blows Tel Aviv is landing against Hezbollah could create a “strategic opening” for U.S. imperialist interests in the region. “The opportunity is to degrade Hezbollah and further isolate Syria and Iran,” it said, referring to the governments that have backed Hezbollah.

In September 2004 Washington and Paris jointly sponsored a resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council that called for the disarming of Hezbollah and the withdrawal of the 14,000 Syrian troops from Lebanon. The following spring Damascus pulled out its forces as the result of both imperialist pressure and mass protests demanding an end to its decades-long intervention in Lebanon.

Now Tel Aviv and the U.S. rulers seek to press their advantage against Tehran and Damascus, as well as Hezbollah, a capitalist party that calls for an “Islamic Republic.” The group gained popular support for playing a leading role in the resistance to the Israeli occupation. It now holds 14 out of 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament, and two seats in the cabinet.

Responding to a proposal floated by various governments and UN secretary general Kofi Annan for an “international” military force to police southern Lebanon, the Wall Street Journal editors rejected the idea of anything modeled on the 2,000-troop UN force that has been in the area for 28 years. On the other hand, said the big-business daily, “an international force inserted after Israel finishes cutting Hezbollah down to size” could take advantage of “an opening to disarm Hezbollah, and isolate Iran.”

Opinions in Lebanon on such a force vary. “There is confusion about the role of the proposed multinational ‘peace’ force for the south,” Bashar Abu-Sayfan, a Palestinian refugee in Beirut told the Militant. “In my neighborhood most would say that it is a good step, that it will stop the fighting and get rid of the problem by reigning in Hezbollah. Others, like myself, are saying they have come before and we have seen their true colors. They will not come to help us.”

Meanwhile, the IDF attack on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip that began June 25 goes on without a stop. The Jerusalem Post reported July 26 on a new assault on northern Gaza in which 20 Palestinians were killed. Some 50 tanks entered Gaza and in eight strikes overnight “Israeli aircraft blasted several houses of Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives,” according to the Post. In similar strikes over the last two years Tel Aviv has assassinated much of the leadership of Hamas, the governing party in the Palestinian National Authority.

Georges Mehrabian in Athens, Greece, contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
20,000 rally in Sydney against Israeli assaults
Thousands join protests against Israeli assault in Lebanon  
 
 
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