After two weeks of the Israeli offensive in Lebanon,
the battles on the border and the destructure of the
infrastructure continue with the deliberate goal of
terrorizing the civilian population. As this scandal
unfolds, Condoleeza Rice began her diplomatic tour
aiming to gain more time for the Israeli army to
continue using US bombs and weapons to devastate
Lebanon, while grandstanding on a search for a
"permanent and sustainable" cease-fire. During her
journey, she began to talk more insistently about the
formation of an international peace-keeping force that
would take on the difficult task of preventing new
Hezbollah attacks or that would collaborate with the
Lebanese army to do it. Though many doubt the
viability for Israel of these alternatives for
containing the threat of Hezbollah, one shouldn’t
dismiss the possibility that after a cease-fire Israel
would seek to impose some type of international
intervention.

Nevertheless, it’s not yet clear when this moment will
arrive. In the first days of its military campaign,
Israel enjoyed wide international backing which opened
a window of opportunity to qualitatively weaken
Hezbollah, a point which was supported by the US in
its effort to extricate itself from the strategic
impasse it faces in the region as a consequence of the
military quagmire in Iraq. However, as the images of
the destruction of infrastructure and the enormous
suffering of the Lebanese (and Palestinian) masses
spread, that support has been deteriorating. Once
again, Israel is under strong international pressure,
along with its master, the US. Let’s not forget that
the Bush administration remains politically weak. In
this context, even though the US would like to push
ahead toward the defeat of Hezbollah, the poll numbers
and the growing problems in Iraq prevent the US from
supporting Israel indefinitely. These are the
conditions that make the introduction of an
international intervention force worthwile. The US
wants breathe life, at least provisionally, into an
option that the Israeli army, frightened by the high
costs and fatal consequences of the 1982 invasion of
Lebanon, has not been willing to consider. This is
why, at the same time as we redouble our efforts to
defeat Israel’s military offensive, we must make clear
our complete opposition to the deployment of any
military force, whether under the command of the UN or
NATO, on Lebanese soil. A conclusive military victory
for Israel, or, if this is not possible, the
introduction of an imperialist military force in a
buffer zone on the Israel-Lebanon border, would be a
defeat for the masses of the region who only want to
shake off the Israeli hegemony backed up by the money
and arms of US imperialism.

With this perspective we revolutionaries fight to
destroy the source, since its creation, of oppression
and permanent wars in the region: the state of Israel,
a state founded on the expulsion of the indigenous
Arab population and a state that can only maintain
itself on the basis of permanent war and oppression
against the Palestinian masses and the neighboring
Arab countries, as its entire history demonstrates.
Because of this state of war, despite the political
character of Hezbollah, we revolutionaries defend
Hezbollah against the aggression of the zionist state
and we consider its acts of resistance against the
terrorist Israeli state legitimate, at the same time
as we maintain complete political independence from
this radical islamic group. We are for the defeat of
the Israeli aggression against Lebanon, which, if it
were to succeed, would only establish a more
pro-imperialist government which would most likely
accept a major imperialist "peace-keeping"
intervention, once the Israeli army had cleared the
way. Only a revolutionary workers leadership,
independent of all the bourgeois governments of the
region, not only the the friends of Israeli but also
those that today seem to be its enemies as is the case
of Syria and Iran, can be an alternative for the just
aspirations of the masses of the region. We marxist
revolutionaries fight for the destruction of the state
of Israel and insist that a secular, democratic, and
non-racist Palestine is only possible as a socialist
and workers Palestine, where Arabs and Jews can live
together in peace, on all the historic territory of
Palestine (Israel proper and the current Palestinian
territories in the West Bank and Gaza), as part of a
Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East.