Relief swept across Lebanon when a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect on Wednesday 27 November. Thousands of displaced people headed back to their homes in south Lebanon, with many finding them destroyed or without electricity and water. Around 4,000 Lebanese people will never return home, having been killed by the Israeli bombardments during the war. As with Gaza, the death toll has been glaringly disproportionate: 120 Israelis died, 3% of the toll suffered by the Lebanese.
The World Bank estimated a cost of $3.4 billion for the physical damage to structures during the war. In addition, no price can be put on the destruction of over 30 ancient towns and villages which can never be restored to their historic authenticity. Reports of barbaric destruction being stepped up in the final days before the ceasefire also showed the utterly callous nature of the Israeli state’s offensive.
The ceasefire agreement, brokered by the US and France, largely repeated the deal drawn up to end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, which said that Israeli and Hezbollah forces should withdraw from Lebanon’s territory south of the Litani river and that Hezbollah should not rearm. This time, the withdrawals are to take place over 60 days and the zone they leave is to be monitored by US personnel and policed by UN and Lebanese troops.
Hardly anyone is certain that the ceasefire agreement will actually hold, not least because Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged fast military action against any perceived violations of it. In the first days after it, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) did carry out further deadly attacks and continued to threaten Lebanese civilians with death if they returned to certain villages close to Israel’s border.
Hezbollah, an organisation based on right-wing political Shia Islam, had its origin in fighting Israeli state aggression and will no doubt aim to rebuild the fighting capacity it has lost during this latest war. However, in the short term it will likely aim to shore up its base in the Shia Muslim sections of Lebanon’s population through turning to rebuilding destroyed homes and infrastructure. It has been promised some funding for that from its sponsor, Iran’s theocratic regime, which will be wanting to preserve its influence in Lebanon despite its own domestic economic crisis.
From the start of the war on Gaza 14 months ago, Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel, to signal its military strength in Lebanon and the region and to try to avoid being accused of abandoning the Palestinians and Gaza’s ruling party, Hamas. All along, Hezbollah’s leaders insisted they wouldn’t accept a ceasefire with Israel that didn’t also end the bombardment of Gaza. But now, their U-turn on that position has shown how damaged Hezbollah was becoming in the face of Israel’s massive firepower and foreign intelligence surveillance.
Israeli missiles killed Hezbollah’s top leaders along with many of its fighters and a substantial amount of its military equipment. But this doesn’t mean it won’t still be the strongest military force in what is a barely functioning state. An article in the Jerusalem Post reckoned: “Hezbollah still has tens of thousands of fighters – the vast majority of its rank-and-file forces, even as a majority of its commanders have been killed” (27.11.24). It can also for the time being continue to be a leading political player in Lebanon’s corrupt, highly fractious parliament and other state institutions.
Volatility in Israel
In Israel, Netanyahu argued that the ceasefire would allow a focus on countering Iran, renewing the IDF’s arms supplies and human energy, and that it would isolate Hamas in Gaza. Before September’s escalation against Hezbollah to a full-blown war, IDF generals had warned against military overstretch if Israel was to fight on a second front beyond Gaza, and that overstretch was becoming evident.
One of the ways it was impacting on the survival of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition was that an increasing level of reluctance by reservists to serve in the IDF operations was feeding into widespread anger against the ultra-orthodox parties in the coalition, who want to prevent the government from legislating that the ultra-orthodox must serve in the IDF. Another possible contributing reason for the ceasefire was suggested by media reports saying that if it wasn’t agreed, Netanyahu believed that US president Joe Biden might take some unwelcome actions in his last two months of office, such as weapons delays or a less friendly stance in UN bodies.
Many Israelis on the political right wanted a more far-reaching deal, including the creation of a depopulated buffer zone in Lebanon’s south. Depopulation rather than occupation, which hasn’t been among the expansionist ambitions of most of the Israeli right, is seen as the next step as there is no desire for a repeat of the draining occupation that lasted for 18 years after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982.
For now, Netanyahu clearly feels boosted by the prospect of Donald Trump becoming US president – especially as Trump has selected some top officials who are close to the Israeli right; and by the damage inflicted by the IDF on Hamas, Gaza and Hezbollah; and by successfully sacking his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who had argued for a ceasefire in Gaza. Those factors, along with Trump’s call for the Gaza war to be finished as soon as possible, could mean that Netanyahu will order that war to be even more horrifically stepped up in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, and more measures taken to increase and consolidate Israeli annexation in the West Bank.
However, while most of Israel’s capitalist class hasn’t been opposed to war against Hamas or Hezbollah, only a minority backs Netanyahu’s ultra-right wing government with its reliance on small far-right parties which are a liability for their interests. This has been shown by an unprecedented degree of overt differences with the government being expressed by the heads of state institutions, including the military, intelligence services and judiciary. During November, the judiciary announced it won’t delay Netanyahu’s trial for corruption any longer; and state prosecutors arrested four people in Netanyahu’s inner circle, accusing them of leaking intelligence documents to foreign media.
These are just some of the machinations at the top, but a greater potential threat to Netanyahu’s government would be a new mass movement arising against it. There have already been two mass movements during its term in office, one lasting for nine months in 2023 and another in early September 2024, both including general strike action. The war against Hezbollah cut across expression of mass opposition and helped Netanyahu to maintain his base of support in a minority of the population. But a resurgence of anger is only a matter of time, especially while Israeli hostages remain captive in Gaza, and in the longer term as working people will be expected to pay the cost of the wars. Also, the wars won’t bring greater security for Israelis: while forcing Hezbollah away from the Israeli border reduces the chance of it carrying out a land attack, it can’t indefinitely prevent missiles from being fired on Israel from other parts of Lebanon or surrounding countries. The 60,000 displaced residents of Israel’s north don’t feel safe to return home.
Regional instability
The ceasefire deal can appear to have reduced the possibility of an uplift of regional war, but dangers of that remain, especially regarding how the US and Israel will respond to Iran on the issue of its nuclear programme. For Iran, the weakening of Hezbollah is a blow, as Hezbollah has been the strongest force in the Iran-led regional ‘axis of resistance’. Also, Iran-linked forces in Syria and Yemen have been hit by Israeli or western missiles, and now Iran’s Syrian ally, the Assad regime, has been markedly set back by a dramatic military takeover of Aleppo by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – an organisation based on right-wing political Sunni Islam, which had established itself in Idlib province in northwest Syria. Without doubt, the coming period in the region will be one of great turmoil and uncertainty.
There can be no military solution to the conflicts, whether through the weaponry of the world or regional powers, or through the resistance of militias like those of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are not democratically controlled or offering a political alternative to the capitalist system that breeds war. Nor is any solution possible on the basis of capitalist ‘peace’ negotiations. Trump wants to revive links between Arab countries and Israel, as pushed in his first term through the Abraham accords. But the Arab masses are not willing to ignore the plight of the Palestinians in the way that their ruling elites want to, and the Israeli ruling class is determined to prevent the Palestinians from achieving national liberation.
Despite the revived lip service being paid by the western powers to the need for a Palestinian state, they haven’t even departed enough from their alliance with Israel’s present leaders to actually stop the slaughter and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, or the increased repression and land seizures in the West Bank, never mind pioneer moves towards a Palestinian state. This doesn’t mean that international negotiations for a Palestinian entity won’t be resurrected when the present prolonged round of bloodshed is over, but on a capitalist basis it wouldn’t be a genuine, independent state or one that could provide decent living standards for most people within it. That can only be achieved on a socialist basis, through struggles towards the building of a socialist Palestine alongside a socialist Israel, as part of a socialist confederation in the region.
The indictment of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court (ICC) is significant in being the first indictment of western allies by that court and in applying a little more pressure on Netanyahu and Co, but won’t in itself stop the war on Gaza. Likewise with all the other gestures by the western powers so far against the war. US imperialism denounced the ICC warrants and, notwithstanding minor threats it might have made to try to obtain the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, it continues to supply massive firepower to Israel – Biden has just approved an extra $680 million in arms supplies, over and above the estimated nearly $18 billion of military aid already given during the war. Meanwhile, as winter sets in, the situation in Gaza is becoming even more desperate.
Ordinary people worldwide can place no trust in the capitalist ruling elites to end the conflicts, or in them acting in the interests of working people at home. Willingness to enter into mass struggle has been shown by movements in many countries, including in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt and Tunisia. The missing ingredients have been consciousness that the working class has the real power in society – without it the capitalists can run nothing, and the building of independent, democratic, mass workers’ organisations that can learn the lessons of past struggles and put forward a socialist alternative. Capitalism can’t provide a future free of poverty, war and environmental destruction; and disillusionment in it as a system is at an unprecedented level globally. So development of socialist consciousness and organisations has the potential to become a fast process in the period to come.
