Do you want to know why there are 40,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East and why Israel, the main U.S. ally there, is now carrying out genocide and war crimes in Gaza, Lebanon, and across the region, and threatening war against Iran?
It starts with this:
The dominant capitalist system today rests on, and could not exist or function without, the cruel exploitation of literally billions of people throughout the world—and especially the vicious super-exploitation of people in the Third World (Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia), including more than 150 million children—forced to work in slave-like conditions in sweatshop factories, mines and farms.
—@BobAvakianOfficial, REVOLUTION #84
For the rulers of the U.S., maintaining their dominant position in this global system of exploitation demands that the U.S. control key regions, markets, and resources across the planet, while preventing rivals from doing so, and the masses of people from rising up against their exploitation and oppression.
Doing all that requires barbaric violence—endless wars, interventions, coups, assassinations, torture, and more. And that’s where Israel comes in as an armed enforcer of U.S. interests in the Middle East, and why the U.S. continues to back, fund and arm it to the tune of over $17 billion in the last year alone—even in the face of its blatant, barbaric genocide in Gaza.
Israel Expands Invasion, Bombing and Terror Campaign—Over One Million Displaced, 2,000 Killed, and More Every Day
Hisham al-Baba, a 59-year-old Lebanese man, lay in a hospital bed in the city of Sidon. He was visiting his sister Donize when Israel bombed her home. He’d been trapped under the rubble for nine hours before being rescued. He was one of the “lucky” ones. His sister, her husband, and their two children were killed. “They killed all these people, but they didn’t say why they hit this place. This is a war crime,” he said. “We are 100 percent defenseless people. We are not affiliated with anyone.” This bombing was “barbaric.”1
There are thousands of stories like this today in Lebanon, and the number grows by the day.
On Thursday, October 10, Israel destroyed an eight-story and a four-story apartment building in central Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, killing 22 and wounding 117 more. These buildings were in densely-populated civilian areas with homes, apartments, schools and shops. This was Israel’s deadliest strike in Beirut in the past year.2
The bomb that caused this death and destruction was made in the USA. An on-the-scene investigation by the Guardian found remnants of a “US-manufactured joint direct attack munition (Jdam)” in the rubble of the collapsed building. These are guidance kits used with massive U.S. bombs weighing from 500 to 2,000 pounds.
The Israeli military recently announced it had launched air strikes against over 1,100 targets since it began its land invasion of Lebanon on October 1. More than 2,100 Lebanese have been killed and more than 10,212 wounded in the last year. Over 1,500 of the deaths have taken place in the last several weeks. Over 100 children have been killed in just the last 11 days and another 690 injured—“bloodied, bruised, and broken” in the words of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund—over the last two months. Some 400,000 other children have been forced to flee from their homes.
Netan-Nazi Promises “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza”
This mass murder isn’t the accidental by-product of a “precise,” “limited” military operation by Israel that is doing all it can to avoid civilian casualties. Just the opposite and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“Netan-Nazi”) said as much this past week.
On October 8, he issued an ominous message threatening the Lebanese people that the death and suffering they were facing was their own fault: “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of the long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
Lebanon is a sovereign nation with a diverse population, including Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and Christians, and a number of different political trends. Hezbollah, an Islamic fundamentalist organization backed by Iran, is the dominant (but not the only) political and military force in Lebanon and its main base of support is Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim population.
The scope of Israel’s “end-game” objectives are not yet clear. But Netanyahu’s threat and Israel’s actions make clear, at the very least, that Israel is out to destroy Hezbollah, and doesn’t give a fuck about how many others gets slaughtered, maimed, or terrorized, and how much devastation is caused in the process—in other words, that the rest of Lebanon is left as just so much “collateral damage.”
This kind of indiscriminate bombing and collective punishment are clear-cut war crimes and violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty. And they’re being carried out with U.S. support! How do we know? Because on October 9, the day after Netan-Nazi issued his threat, he spoke with President Biden and VP Harris. They assured him of America’s “ironclad” support for Israel. No mention was made of his potentially genocidal threat or Israel’s barbaric aggression against Lebanon.
Here are some of the same criminal tactics Israel is now using in Lebanon that it’s been using for over a year against the Palestinian people of Gaza:
Mass bombings, indiscriminate killing of civilians, destruction of civilian structures. Israel is bombing hospitals and killing healthcare workers. The same day it took down buildings in Beirut and killed 22 people, it bombed a Red Crescent (the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross) field hospital on the border between Lebanon and Syria. Israel killed five paramedics in southern Lebanon on October 9. Over 100 medical and emergency workers have been killed by Israel attacks in Lebanon over the past year, including 72 in just the last month, when there have been 18 Israeli attacks on health facilities in Lebanon.
The World Health Organization has condemned Israeli escalating attacks on healthcare workers and hospitals and warns of outbreaks of disease in shelters packed with people displaced by Israeli attacks.
Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes have forced some 40 percent of Lebanon’s 1.5 million students from their homes, according to Lebanese officials, delaying the start of the school year.
Destroying whole villages. New aerial video shows that Israel has flattened at least two Lebanese villages near its border.3 In the villages of Maroun al-Ras and Yaroun scores of homes have been leveled, along with a 300-year-old mosque by controlled explosions by the Israeli military, and large areas in the villages were burned. These villages had been abandoned, and the destruction of civilian sites is a war crime.
Kill zones. Israel has warned Lebanese living in southern Lebanon to move away from “buildings and areas used by Hezbollah for military purposes such as those used to store weapons”—without specifying which areas needed to be evacuated and where to go for safety. People have also been warned against driving or riding in their cars, the main way many can escape. All this implies that any Lebanese who remains or attempts to drive away could be targeted and killed.
Long-term displacement. This past week Israel sent more troops into Lebanon and expanded its invasion of the south. It issued evacuation orders for villages across southern Lebanon, forcing people from more than 100 villages and urban areas to flee. According to the BBC, one-third of the Lebanese population—including most of southern Lebanon—are now under evacuation orders.4
Israel’s U.S.-backed aggression and atrocities in Lebanon are not only a deepening horror for the people of Lebanon, they are also accelerating the danger of a wider, regional war with potentially devastating impacts on the region and beyond.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its aggression against Lebanon, and its threats to the region must stop. And it’s up to those of us living in the U.S. to do everything in our power to stop them. And that means NOT choosing between murderous oppressors, both of whom are up to their necks in the blood of the people.
As Bob Avakian writes in his social media dispatch @BobAvakianOffical REVOLUTION #88, “A Rare Time, and Urgent Need—for Revolution—Not Continuing Enslavement to this System”:
As horrific as Trump is, supporting Harris and the Democratic Party means enlisting as willing accomplices in the crusade of U.S. capitalism-imperialism to remain the world’s number one exploiter, oppressor and plunderer of people and the environment, even at the cost of risking the future, and the very existence, of humanity.
And
This is not a time to be siding with one group of oppressors or another. This is a rare time—a very rare opening—a chance that may come only once in a lifetime—a chance to take advantage of the deep divisions among the ruling oppressors and go after their whole system, with the aim of bringing the whole thing down, and putting something much better in its place.
