Stop U.S.-Israeli terror!

Workers World Party joins with all anti-imperialist and anti-war forces in condemning U.S.-backed Israeli aggression, which is bringing increasing death and destruction to the people of Lebanon just as it has brought similar suffering and oppression to the Palestinian people in the occupied territories in this most recent phase of the struggle. We would also like to extend our heartfelt sympathies to the people of Lebanon, who are being victimized by this savagery.

Likewise, we hail the resistance led by Hezbollah and Hamas and call on all anti-imperialist and anti-war forces to join together to mobilize to stop this criminal war and end the occupation of Palestine.

The Bush administration is working overtime to see to it that its Zionist client regime in Tel Aviv expands its brutal and indiscriminate aggression against Lebanon. After almost

four weeks of continuous Israeli bombing, close to a thousand Lebanese have been killed, thousands are wounded, and over a million people, more than a quarter of the population, have been displaced by the terror campaign of the Israeli generals, which is fully supported, supplied and re-supplied by Washington.

The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld group was trying to compensate for the disaster in Iraq by getting what they thought would be a quick victory in their phony, so-called “war on terrorism.” They conspired with the Israeli government to open up the offensive using any pretext. In this case, it was the killing of three Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others in an action by Hezbollah. The scale of the Israeli aggression that followed makes it clear that Washington and Tel Aviv were simply lying in wait to attack.

But the planners in the Pentagon and the generals in Tel Aviv made the same mistake with Lebanon as Washington did with Iraq. They wildly underestima ted the ability and willingness of the masses to resist. There is no quick victory. There have been four weeks of resistance and an end to the myth of Israeli invincibility. The Bush admini stra tion has tied Washing ton openly to Israeli aggression, almost as if it had sent in U.S. troops. The whole world can see it.

The campaign to vilify Hezbollah and Hamas is in full swing. For sending rockets into Israel, they are condemned as “terrorists” by the real terrorists, who have unloaded thousands of tons of U.S.-made bombs and flown thousands of bombing missions against the people and infrastructure of Lebanon and Palestine.

Bush and the Israelis accuse Hezbollah of “starting it first.” But this conflict was first started when the Zionists, backed by imperialism, decided to drive the Pales tinian people off their land in 1948 and set up a racist settler state that would become a virtual forward base for the Pentagon in the Middle East and serve as a protector of the fabulous oil wealth owned or controlled by the U.S. oil companies.

In any case, regardless of who struck the first blow in the present conflict, anti-imperialists, especially Marxists, take their stand based not on who started a particular struggle but on who is fighting on the side of imperialism, on the side of the giant transnational monopolies, and is trying to impose national oppression, and who is fighting against it. All resistance of oppressed peoples is ultimately rooted in defense against super-exploitation.

In this regard the U.S.-British-Israeli propaganda machine is trying to make this a struggle against “Islamic fundamentalism,” which is devoted to destroying “Western civilization.” But anti-imperialist forces must look beneath ideology and focus on what social forces are in combat in any particular struggle in order to determine how to take sides.

In the case of the war in Lebanon, Hezbollah has rallied the forces fighting against Zionist expansionism. Hezbollah fought Israeli occupation for 18 years and defeated the occupation. That is its crime in the eyes of imperialism.

Hamas has been steadfast in refusing to recognize the right of occupation and in demanding the national rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to return. That is its crime in the eyes of imperialism.

Bush and the U.S. ruling class have no problem with the extreme fundamentalism of the Saudi royal monarchy because it has been a tool of the U.S. oil companies since the 1940s. The feudo-bourgeois royal families of the oil states in the Middle East are subordinates of imperialism. The Islamic fundamentalism of the counter-revolutionaries who overthrew the socialist government of Afghanistan in the early 1990s did not bother the CIA, who funded them.

Some in the anti-war movement, even some who call themselves Marxists, have separated themselves from Hezbollah and Hamas, have even attacked them when they are under fire, on the grounds of ideology, because they are religious. This is a complete violation of principled anti-imperialism and Marxism.

Ideological differences should not stand in the way of uniting against imperialism in the living mass struggle. Breaking unity at a time when U.S. imperialism and the Israeli ruling class want to extinguish the forces of resistance is an abandonment of internationalist duty. One cannot in reality be on the side of the oppressed in general while opposing their actual, living struggle and the organizations that are carrying out that struggle.

As Israeli bombs fall on cities, towns and villages, the would-be rulers of Lebanon in Washington are engaged in dragged-out negotiations with the former colonialist rulers of Lebanon in Paris to jointly impose an imperialist settlement on the country through the UN Security Council. They are scheming to destroy the anti-imperialist resistance of Hezbollah, which is under attack by the true terrorists in Washington and Tel Aviv, not for its religion, not for its tactics, but for its justified resistance to U.S.-backed Zionist aggression and occupation.

Long live international proletarian solidarity! Long live the heroic resistance of oppressed peoples everywhere!

Signed by WWP Secretariat:
Teresa Gutierrez, Sara Flounders, Larry Holmes, Monica Moorehead, Deirdre Griswold and Fred Goldstein.