Oscar Parry, Hackney and Islington Socialist Party
Trump and Netanyahu’s war on Iran has unleashed fresh horrors across the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon, to which the Israeli state has now turned its murderous attention. One in five people, over a million, have been driven from their homes.
The UN’s World Food Programme warns of a “deepening humanitarian emergency”: 1.24 million people, almost a quarter of the population, no longer have enough to eat. Over 80% of markets in southern Lebanon have stopped functioning. Bombed roads, ruined homes and children sheltering in schools – this is daily life for thousands of families. When the Israeli military issued evacuation orders, it told Christians they could stay and Muslims must flee, illustrating the sectarian poison of its war.
At the start of May, Israeli forces drove their deepest incursion into Lebanon in 26 years and threatened to bomb Beirut’s southern suburbs, sending thousands fleeing in panic. Even Israel’s imperialist backers are split. Trump reportedly raged at Netanyahu over the phone, branding him “fucking crazy” and ordering him to halt the assault on Beirut. But the row is not about Lebanese lives. It is about oil and profit: Iran refuses to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the world’s energy, without a Lebanon ceasefire, and markets panicked as crude prices spiked.
The hypocrisy is staggering. The same Western governments now wringing their hands over Lebanon have backed Netanyahu’s Israeli regime through years of genocidal slaughter in Gaza. Their ‘concern’ reaches only as far as their balance sheets.
No capitalist politician, in Washington, Tel Aviv, Tehran or Beirut, will end this nightmare. Only the working class can. Workers across Lebanon, Israel and the whole region must organise independently of every capitalist elite.
Working-class struggle for socialist change to meet the needs of all can be the basis of a future voluntary, equal federation of socialist states in the region that can end war, oppression and poverty.
