HEZBOLLAH’S victory over Israel in the July war of 2006 changed the relationship of forces in the Middle East, and the significance of that victory increases with time.
It is something that the Israelis do not want to see repeated, since that July defeat has shaken the morale of the Israeli army and reminded the entire Zionist camp, that while the Arabs can lose war after war, as they have done since the 1967 blitzkrieg, and still dominate the Middle East, Israel has only to suffer one serious defeat and immediately its very existence as ‘the Jewish state’ is in the greatest danger.
Israel remains an imperialist outpost in the Middle East, whose intrinsic strength is minimal. Any strength that it has comes from the gigantic support given to it by US imperialism, which arms it, sustains it financially and guarantees its existence.
The majority of its Zionist population is not in fact rooted in Palestine, but has arrived from the US, the UK and Russia, to live in luxury in settlements and lord it over the Arabs. In a nutshell, a good portion of the Israeli population has somewhere to go back to, if the going gets really tough.
So when the US administration and the US itself begins to wobble, as a result of the defeat of its occupation army in Iraq, the Israelis can feel nothing less than a sense of dread, and an acute feeling of insecurity about the future.
Even when the US presidency announces it is to hand out over $60 billion in arms to its allies in the Middle East – Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf States – to fight the next war against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in the Lebanon, morale does not improve, since the whole region knows that decisive battles are rapidly approaching that will decide the fate of the Jewish state.
As a direct result of the July 2006 invasion of the Lebanon by the Israelis, Hezbollah and Syria are now much stronger, since over half of the Christian part of the Lebanese population wants to make an alliance with Hezbollah, and not Israel and the United States.
The issue has reached the point where Hezbollah has rearmed and reorganised itself, and is now many time stronger than it was on the eve of the July 2006 Israeli invasion.
In fact, Nasrallah has warned Israel that if it attacks the Lebanon again, it will be in for a very nasty surprise, that will change the face of the entire region.
Hezbollah has now risen to the point where it is thinking not just of survival, but of the strategic significance of winning the next war, when it comes.
In Palestine, the Israeli leaders have paid for their contempt for the agreements that they made with the PLO at Oslo but refused to keep to, by having to cede Gaza to Hamas, and now being reduced to the point where they have to rush to try and make a deal with a fraction of Fatah led by Abbas.
They have to rush to this since Abbas can be removed at any time and they will be left with nobody to negotiate the kind of Palestinian bantustan that they want to see established in various parts of the West Bank.
It is crystal clear that signing a deal with Abbas to cede to him parts of the West Bank as long as he gives up the right of Palestinian refugees to return, will not only not resolve the Palestinian problem in favour of Israel, but will in fact ensure the rapid disappearance of Abbas and his political supporters in Fatah from the political scene.
In fact, there is no doubt that the future of the Middle East rests with the revolutionary Iraqi masses, the revolutionary Lebanese national movement led by Hezbollah and the revolutionary masses of Palestine.
The latter know that they will have to reorientate themselves politically after the debacle produced by the Abbas leadership. The future of the Middle East is socialist, and the Palestinian masses will develop the revolutionary leadership that will lead the struggle for a socialist Middle East and for the complete defeat of imperialism and Zionism.