Israeli Taaffeites Capitulate to Zionism Over Lebanon

We reprint below an article translated from Le Bolchévik No. 177 (September 2006), journal of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League. The statement by Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR) referred to in the article was dated 31 July. It appears in English, with a 28 July date, on the Web site of Socialist Alternative, GR’s U.S. cothinkers.

As the Israeli air force and artillery were shelling Lebanese towns and villages, killing more than a thousand people and displacing a million people—i.e., a quarter of the population of the country; as the bombings were devastating the infrastructure of the country; as the Zionist oppression of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was reaching new heights, Gauche Révolutionnaire, French section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), reproduced a declaration dated 31 July of its “sister organization in Israel,” Maavak Sozialisti (Socialist Fight), which it distributed as a leaflet at an August 12 demonstration in Paris against the Israeli offensive. This declaration opposes the Israeli attack in Lebanon, but on the basis that…the poor Israeli state was a victim of a deadly trap by the Lebanese Hezbollah:

“The massive bombardment has harmed workers more than it has harmed Hezbollah—which is dragging the Israeli army into the trap it has prepared in South Lebanon.

“And now, after having promised us that there will be no need for a land invasion and a re-occupation of South Lebanon, the politicians and generals are sending the ordinary soldiers to do exactly these things.”

So, it was the unlikelihood of an easy military victory and the risk of the conflict being prolonged that drove the Israeli acolytes of Gauche Révolutionnaire to want to “stop the second Lebanon war.” In other words, the call for an end of the fighting is in no way linked to any kind of solidarity with the population bombed in Lebanon! For these pro-Zionist “revolutionaries,” the bloody oppression of the Lebanese and the Palestinians is of little import: their statement appeared on the day following the Qana massacre, where dozens of people, including many children, were killed, and their leaflet has not a single slogan addressing the oppression of the Lebanese or Palestinian peoples.

Continuing with such base chauvinism, the Israeli social-patriots of Maavak Sozialisti went so far as to accuse the Ehud Olmert government of having done a poor job and not having sufficiently guaranteed security in Northern Israel against Hezbollah’s missiles:

“The government does not care about the residents of the north, neither those who left nor those who remained.

“The capitalist system which in normal times is incapable of providing us with a decent living, health, decent education and affordable housing, is also incapable of providing security and is leading us into a new quagmire in Gaza, the West Bank and in Lebanon.”

In this conflict, the LTF/ICL was unambiguously for the military defense of Hezbollah against the Zionist attack, without, however, giving the slightest political support to this reactionary Islamist organization. Gauche Révolutionnaire in France published another statement, dated 20 July, which, contrary to that of its Israeli group, theoretically accords to Hezbollah “the right to resist Israeli aggression,” while adding: “But to do it with indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilian areas is counterproductive.” As for us, we consider the terrorism of the Zionist state in Lebanon to be infinitely greater than that of Hezbollah.

It is necessary to overthrow the Zionist capitalist rulers, and the only social force which can accomplish this task is the proletariat, Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking. This is why the fight for socialism in Israel/Palestine is inseparable from the fight to mobilize the Hebrew-speaking proletariat in defense of the Palestinian people, and more generally, to break it from the Zionist ideology which today chains it to the Israeli bourgeoisie. Likewise, Arab workers must break with nationalism and reactionary, anti-Semitic Islamic fundamentalism. We fight to forge authentic revolutionary workers parties in the Near East, based on such a perspective. This would be in fact the antithesis of the despicable social-patriotism of Maavak Sozialisti.

This is not the first time, and certainly not the last, that GR has been caught red-handed capitulating to Zionism. Last year they published an article in their paper complaining that the wall that imprisons the Palestinians of the West Bank is “an expression of the failure of the Israeli ruling class to respond to rampant insecurity and to the social conflicts caused by the economic crisis” (L’Egalité, March-April 2005). In other words, for GR, the problem with the Zionist terrorists who rule the state of Israel is not that they oppress the Palestinians, but that their methods are ineffective for bringing the Palestinians to heel.

This said, while Maavak Sozialisti is a social-democratic organization committed to the Israeli Zionist bourgeoisie, GR, for its part, is a social-democratic organization committed to the French bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of the Dreyfus Affair and of the anti-Semitic raids under Vichy. GR proved this once again during the Israeli attack against Lebanon by publishing two leaflets, neither of which mentioned, much less condemned, the criminal maneuvers in Lebanon of the Chirac/
de Villepin government, whose UN resolution No. 1559 (together with the U.S.) laid the basis for the Israeli attack.

Only the creation of a socialist federation including the Hebrew-, Farsi-, Kurdish-, Arabic-, etc. speaking peoples, Sunnis and Shi’ites, Christians and Muslims can bring about peace in the region. This will be realized only through a series of workers revolutions led by multiethnic proletarian parties, in the Near East as well as in the imperialist centers of Europe, the United States and Japan. This is what all the sections of the International Communist League are dedicated to. For a socialist federation of the Near East!