I was talking with a Lebanese man I met recently who painted a similar picture that the author describes here with regard to Hezbollah and the Shia population in Lebanon. He was from that community. The Israeli regime fears nothing more than the unity of the various religious groupings in Lebanon, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Druze, and Hezbollah fears the same. I think I am correct in believing that the name Hezbollah, means “Party of God” which is enough to warn us of its reactionary character. Religious sectarianism here is the scourge of the working classes just as it has been throughout the world from Northern Ireland to India. Like racism and tribalism, this divide and rule tactic was central to British colonialism’s global power and is an important weapon in US imperialism’s interests in the region.
Sirantos Fotopoulos seems to me to have painted a realistic picture here but I am no expert on the events in this part of the world. and share the commentary for readers' interest. I am generally committed though to the view that it is only the working class of the region and indeed the world, that can resolve what are global capitalist crises and it is the weakness or absence of the working class and our organisations that creates the space for religious sectarianism and other divisive elements. So I would be interested in finding out more about the working classes of the region and their organizations which I accept have been weakened, if not destroyed in some cases due to religious extremism and interference in the form of US imperialism. RM FFWP Admin
by Sirantos Fotopoulos
Yesterday morning, the ink on the fragile ceasefire had barely dried when Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the largest single-day bombardment of Beirut in the current war. The operation was named, with an almost confessional candor, "Operation Eternal Darkness." More than 100 targets across five civilian neighbourhoods were struck within the space of ten minutes. At least 254 people were killed, among them mourners at a funeral in the Bekaa Valley, three girls in the coastal town of Adloun, and civilians whose charred bodies AP journalists photographed on one of Beirut's busiest intersections at rush hour. The American University of Beirut Medical Center urgently appealed for all blood types. Lebanon's health minister called it catastrophic. Lebanon's president called it a massacre.
The ceasefire in question had been brokered by Pakistan and explicitly stated, in the words of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, that it applied to fighting "everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, effective immediately." France's Emmanuel Macron said Lebanon was fully included. Iran's foreign minister also said Lebanon was fully included. A Hezbollah official said the group had halted attacks and was waiting for mediators. Netanyahu's office, releasing its statement only in English and not in Hebrew, said the ceasefire "does not include Lebanon." Trump, characteristically, said Lebanon was "a separate skirmish" and that it would "get taken care of too," as if a sovereign country of six million people were a minor errand on a to-do list. The legal and diplomatic ambiguity was, to put it generously, manufactured. To put it accurately, it was a lie.
This raises a question that polite diplomatic commentary persistently refuses to answer with the directness it deserves: is Benjamin Netanyahu constitutionally, psychologically, and politically incapable of making peace? The evidence is no longer merely circumstantial. His own opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said this week that there has never been "such a diplomatic disaster in all of our history," that Netanyahu "failed politically, failed strategically, and didn't meet a single one of the goals that he himself set." The left-wing Democrat leader Yair Golan was blunter still: "Netanyahu lied. He promised a historic victory and security for generations. The nuclear program was not destroyed; the ballistic threat remains; the regime is in place and is even stronger coming out of this war."
Netanyahu's governing coalition includes Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister who lives in an illegally built home in an illegal settlement and whose Religious Zionist Party's founding documents derive their territorial claims directly from the Torah. When asked why Jewish people have an exclusive right to all parts of what he calls the Land of Israel, Smotrich does not reach for international law or demographic argument: he reaches for the Bible. His party's coalition agreement with Netanyahu states explicitly that "Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel," which includes everything between the Nile and the Euphrates, and since taking office he has announced 22 new settlements in the West Bank, calling it a "historic decision." Then there is Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Kahanist whose political background, in the assessment of multiple analysts, is rooted in a violently racist movement calling for the expulsion of Palestinians. Kahanism is a far-right, religious Zionist ideology based on the views of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, which advocates for Jewish supremacy, the establishment of a Halakhic (theocratic) state, and the expulsion of non-Jews who do not accept subordination. Ben-Gvir has been sanctioned by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and Spain for inciting settler violence. He was previously barred from military service due to his own extremist views. These are the men without whom Netanyahu has no current government coalition otherwise.
A significant current within Israeli religious nationalism holds that the territorial boundaries of biblical Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates in some formulations, represent not a political preference but a divine mandate. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the ideological father of the settler movement taught that Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel was a sacred commandment that preceded and superseded any state, treaty, or human law. This is the concept known as Greater Israel, and it functions not as a negotiating position but as an eschatological inevitability, a matter not of policy but of prophecy. From this vantage point, a ceasefire is not a strategic pause but a theological betrayal. Settlements are not provocations but sacraments. And perpetual war, conducted preferably by the American military, is not a tragedy to be averted but a necessary station on the road to messianic redemption.
What Netanyahu's government wants is not Israeli military victory in any classically defined sense. They have no interest in the kind of regional settlement that ends wars, normalises borders, and creates stable security arrangements. What they want is for the United States military to do the heavy work of destroying Iran's capacity while Israeli settlement expansion proceeds unimpeded and permanently, until the demographic and territorial facts on the ground make a two-state solution not merely difficult but impossible. They want an American war, American casualties, American financing, and American diplomatic cover, after which they will pocket the territorial gains and return, in their own time, to the systematic displacement of the Palestinian people and the annexation of whatever remains. Netanyahu's current performance, striking Beirut hours after a ceasefire to ensure he cannot be blamed for stopping the war prematurely, is a willful strategic attempt to sabotage the ceasefire.
There is, however, a second axis of cynicism in this catastrophe. The Iranian theocracy, whose proxies Israel claims to be fighting in Lebanon, has spent decades using Hezbollah not as a shield for the Lebanese people but as a weapon against them. Hezbollah emerged not from Lebanese resistance but from the Iranian Revolution, its founding slogans calling for an Islamic Republic from East Beirut to West Beirut. It has, since 1992, built a comprehensive state-within-a-state, with its own military, healthcare, education, and financial infrastructure operating entirely outside the control of any Lebanese government, and it has used that parallel state to hold Lebanon hostage to Tehran's regional agenda. When Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into war against Israel last month in support of Iran, the Lebanese government declared those attacks unlawful. The Lebanese president called for Hezbollah's disarmament and expelled Iran's ambassador-designate. Lebanon's foreign minister told Iran to respect sovereignty. None of this moved Hezbollah because Hezbollah answers not to Lebanon but to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Lebanese Shia community that Hezbollah claims to represent has paid an extraordinary price for this arrangement. More than one million people have been displaced within days. Displaced families packing their tents on Beirut's waterfront yesterday, believing the ceasefire meant they could return home, were caught between Netanyahu's airstrikes and Hezbollah's refusal to honor the truce. The Lebanese economy has been in freefall since 2019, its currency depreciated by more than ninety percent; hospitals overwhelmed; public institutions decimated. A member of the Beirut municipality, surveying the wreckage of yesterday's strikes, said with a terrible simplicity: "This is a residential area. There is nothing military here." That statement applies with equal force to forty years of Iranian foreign policy in Lebanon. Iran has conducted a de facto colonial settler project in Lebanese territory, exploiting sectarian grievances to build an armed proxy that serves theocratic strategic interests and has been credibly implicated in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. This is occupation by another name.
If the ceasefire holds, the Islamic Republic of Iran will have survived a war that killed its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, saw its missile production capabilities severely degraded, and reduced its nuclear enrichment program to rubble. Its new supreme leader, Khamenei's own son Mojtaba, is reportedly close to the Revolutionary Guard and considered more hostile to the West than his father. The political class devoted to the theocracy remains intact. Pro-government demonstrators in Tehran burned American and Israeli flags yesterday on news of the ceasefire announcement and chanted death to compromisers. Mass protests that erupted before the war have been crushed. Within weeks or months, when the noise of international diplomacy has faded and reconstruction aid begins to flow from the tolling of the Hormuz, that government will turn its instruments of repression inward once again. The women of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, who braved death to assert the most basic claims of human dignity, will face renewed state violence from a regime that has used the war as a pretext to silence them. A ceasefire that saves the Iranian theocracy is not, in any morally coherent sense, a victory for the Iranian people in their desire for liberation.
We are therefore confronted with the following tableau: a region in which two deeply reactionary forces, one theological-nationalist and one theological-revolutionary, have constructed a durable symbiosis around the perpetuation of violence, each requiring the other's menace in order to justify its own excesses at home. Netanyahu needs the Iranian threat to hold his coalition together and keep the Israeli courts from prosecuting him for corruption. The Iranian theocracy needs the Israeli threat to suppress its own population and justify its military apparatus. The Lebanese people need neither, and have said so, loudly and at mortal cost. The Palestinian people need neither, and have paid with generations of dispossession. The Syrian people, the Iraqi people, the women and dissidents of Iran, the Lebanese Christians and Druze and Shia who want a functioning state and not a permanent battlefield, need neither. What they need is what both Netanyahu and the Ayatollahs are constitutionally allergic to: a political settlement premised on the dignity and self-determination of human beings who are not on anyone's geopolitical chessboard.
There is a name for what Netanyahu did yesterday, hours after a ceasefire. It is sabotage. The Arab League called it that. Egypt called it premeditated intent to undermine de-scalation. Spain's prime minister said Netanyahu's contempt for life and international law was intolerable. France called the strikes unacceptable. These are not the words of enemies. They are the words of exhausted allies who have finally noticed that the man at the center of this catastrophe has a structural interest not in winning the war but in never ending it. History will record that Operation Eternal Darkness was not named after the darkness it intended to impose on Beirut. It was named, with all the inadvertent accuracy of authoritarian self-revelation, after what its architects have in mind for the future.
*The Title is not from the original
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