Israel’s Six-Front War—Where is it Heading?
October 17, 2024— Can there be any doubt by now that Israel’s Zionist government is carrying out a relentless campaign to annihilate the Palestinian people and seize all of Palestine, and more? Does anyone still think that there is a red line that Israel can cross such that U.S. imperialist rulers will no longer support it?
Let us take a brief look at where we are as of October 17, 2024, as the Zionist state engages in a six-front war (Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran) and the United States sends boots on the ground to Israel while it ramps up its formidable military force in the region that already includes more than 40,000 troops.
Most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have been displaced, forced to flee time and time again, with most families crammed into a tiny slice of land along the Mediterranean Sea, subjected to ongoing bombing and facing starvation and epidemic disease as Israel cuts off even a modicum of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. (According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) no food has entered northern Gaza since early October.)
Aside from the tens-of-thousands of dead and injured, Israeli forces, in the last 12 months, have reduced much of the Gaza Strip to rubble, such that large portions of neighborhoods and communities no longer exist. An analysis in the Guardian (October 10) noted: “More than 70 percent of housing stock has been damaged, along with businesses and countless public buildings, including schools and hospitals.”
In addition, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozed a large swath to create the Netzarim corridor, “a militarized path that bisects Gaza into northern and southern halves” as well as a larger buffer zone along the entire eastern border (adding an extra .62 miles in width to the pre-existing buffer along the full 37-mile length of the Gaza Strip.)
At least half of the Gaza Strip’s farmland has been damaged—citrus orchards and fields now in ruins. Ninety percent of Gaza’s schools and all universities have been destroyed (in whole or in part.)
By May 30, the World Health Organization concluded that 84 percent of Gaza’s health facilities had been damaged or destroyed and more so in the four-and-a half months that have followed. An independent U.N. Commission report (October 10) accused Israel of “committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks” against Gaza’s hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medical workers.
“Attacks on healthcare facilities,” the report charged, “are an intrinsic element of the Israeli security forces’ broader assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the physical and demographic infrastructure of Gaza, as well as of efforts to expand the occupation.” The Commission came to a definitive conclusion: “Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the healthcare system.”
A survey by the group Heritage for Peace detailed 100 historical landmarks damaged, as of December 2023, including the Great Omari Mosque, one of the most important and ancient mosques in historical Palestine; the Church of Saint Porphyrius, thought to be the third oldest church in the world, along with a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery in northern Gaza.
In all, the United Nations has concluded that Israel’s attack created by mid-August 2024 a total of 42 million tons of debris across Gaza. (That is enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore!)
“Clearing the rubble, which contains human remains and unexploded ordinance, then rebuilding,” the Guardian reports, “could take 70 years, and cost more than $80 billion.” But, economists note, this figure doesn’t consider hidden expenses, such as the long-term impact of a labor market devasted by death, injury, and trauma, as well as consideration that construction sites at this scale have to be empty of people.
But does Israel anticipate Palestinians will remain in Gaza and that Gaza will be rebuilt for them? Israel’s latest offensive against the northern part of the Gaza Strip, including a complete siege of the towns of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia along with its refugee camp just north of Gaza City is being reported by the Israeli media as the implementation of “the Generals’ Plan.” This is the vision of retired Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council and current advisor to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for the depopulation of Palestinians from Gaza and replacing them with Jewish settlers. (“Let’s Not Be Intimidated by the World,” published in Yedioth Ahronoth, November 19, 2023.)
As Qassam Muaddi writing for Mondoweiss, October 15, concludes:
“The Generals’ Plan is a condensation of century-long colonial policy. Haifa, Yafa, Askalan, Tyberias, and West Jerusalem all used to be northern Gaza. Today, the southern Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley, where Palestinians are not allowed to build or graze and are attacked by Israeli settlers, are a less intense version of northern Gaza. The Bedouin village in the Naqab, which is unrecognized by the state of Israel and lives under the constant threat of demolition, is yet another version of northern Gaza. …
“‘The only thing standing in the way of the Generals’ Plan,’ Muaddi states, ‘is the decision of more than 200,000 Palestinians to stay in the north and refuse displacement, despite the bombs, drone attacks, hunger, and brutal siege.’”
Lebanon
Now let us look at Lebanon, which has been subjected to a never-ending Zionist attempt at Anschluss (annexation)of its southern region. “New Images Show Lebanese Border Villages Flattened in Israeli Invasion” is the title of a full-page article in the New York Times, October 11. “Scores of homes leveled, a damaged health clinic and a centuries-old mosque (300 years old) now little more than rubble. … Over the last week, the Israeli military has flattened large parts of two border villages: Maroun al Ras and Yaroun.” Satellite images revealed that two other mosques were destroyed along with a Catholic church. The Times reporters add that “One video showed soldiers raising the Israeli flag over a destroyed park in Maroun al-Ras.”
Over one million people, 20 percent of the Lebanese population have been forced so far to flee their homes with no idea which part of the country will be safe. According to the United Nations, Israel’s evacuation orders now cover one quarter of Lebanon’s land area and include more than 100 villages and urban areas. Half of Lebanon’s public schools have been turned into shelters; many families have taken refuge in tents on seaside beaches; and 300,000 people have fled the country.
This is just the tip of Israel’s battle plan. In addition, there has been large-scale bombing of the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, and as in Gaza, so in Lebanon, the IDF has targeted health facilities. Firas Abiad, Lebanon’s minister of health, reported that 13 hospitals have been completely or partially shut down and that Israeli attacks have killed over 150 paramedics and health workers in the past year.
Iran
The suspense, however, remains as to the imminent attack on Iran by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his security apparatus. U.S. President Joe Biden has given the green light, phrasing it in terms of Israel’s right to retaliate for Iran’s October 1 missile launch. We would be remiss if we did not note that Iran had itself responded to Israel’s deadly prior actions.
There is no doubt that targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities has been Netanyahu’s obsession for many years with numerous assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, attacks on its uranium enrichment facilities, and a massive cyber-attack carried out jointly with the U.S. in which more than 1,000 centrifuges were destroyed by the Stuxnet virus.
But Israel’s war plans have gone much further.
“Two years ago,” reported New York Times military reporters David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, and Ronan Bergman (October 9), “dozens of Israeli fighter jets roared over the Mediterranean Sea, simulating a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a drill the Israeli defense forces openly advertised as an exercise in ‘long-range flight, aerial refueling and striking distant targets.’
“The point of the exercise,” the reporters noted, “was not simply to intimidate the Iranians. It was also designed to send a message to the Biden administration: The Israeli air force was training to conduct the operation alone, even though chances of success would be far higher if the United States—with its arsenal of 30,000 pound ‘bunker busters’—joined in the attack.” (The 30,000 bunker buster is the GBU-57A/B, known as the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP.) It requires a special stealth bomber to carry it and has so far never been used in action.)
While President Biden sent the latest U.S. surface-to-air ballistic missile intercept system—the THAAD—to Israel to beef up its defenses, along with 100 American combat troops to operate the complex system, Biden, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and General Michael E. Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command which oversees military operations in the Middle East, supposedly has made it clear that the U.S. is not in favor of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities or its oil production (note that 90 percent of Iranian oil exports are bought by China.)
On Tuesday, October 15, as the world stood on edge hoping that a full-scale war would not be forthcoming, Netanyahu’s office released an arrogant statement: “We listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interest.”
Even as the will of the people of the United States and millions more worldwide is for the U.S. government to stop arming Israel, Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator who is now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, “It strains the bounds of credulity to the breaking point to believe that the administration would act to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel as the Iran-Israel crisis heats up.” (New York Times, October 16.)
Which leaves us with the conclusion: While we who recognize the Zionist state’s intent and U.S. imperialism’s role alongside it must continue our valiant protests, actions, and demonstrations in the streets with the essential demand that not a dollar nor a dime of our taxpayer or pension funds go towards genocide and human rights violations. It is also essential for us to take the steps that can create an independent mass working-class party rooted in labor and oppressed communities which inevitably can vie for political power so that we, ourselves, can stop these genocides and realize the self-determination and democratic aspirations of peoples throughout the world, the Palestinian people foremost among them.
—The Socialist Organizer, October 18, 2024
https://socialistorganizer.org/2024/10/18/israels-six-front-war-where-is-it-heading/