In retaliation for a drone attack targeting civilians that killed one person in a Tel Aviv apartment building and wounded nine others July 19, the Israeli air force struck fuel tanks and a power plant in the Houthi-controlled port city of Hodeidah in Yemen the next day.
This was the first time the Houthis — a reactionary clan-based militia in Yemen funded by Tehran — had succeeded in striking Tel Aviv, and the first time Israeli forces had directly retaliated against the Houthis. Before July 19, Israel had left responding to Houthi attacks, especially on shipping in the Red Sea, to U.S. forces based across the Middle East.
Tehran and its allied militias in Iraq and Yemen have launched some 1,000 missiles and drones against Israel since Oct. 7, more than 200 of them by the Houthis alone, almost all shot down before reaching their targets.
But the biggest immediate danger is from Hezbollah, which has launched more than 6,800 missiles and drones at Israel from Lebanon since Oct. 8. From its formation in 1985 — inspired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei and the bourgeois counterrevolution in Iran — Hezbollah’s goal has been the “final obliteration from existence” of Israel and the Jews.
In addition to killing 30 people so far, wounding 205, and forcing the evacuation of more than 60,000 people in northern Israel near the Lebanese border, Hezbollah’s recent attacks have seriously damaged agricultural and industrial production.
Like Gaza-based Hamas and Hezbollah, the Houthis’ goal is to destroy Israel. What the regime in Tehran and its so-called axis of resistance want is to complete the Nazis’ “Final Solution” of eliminating the Jewish people.
The Oct. 7 anti-Jewish pogrom in Israel shows that this is not an idle threat.
Hamas thugs and their allies — financed, armed and trained by the capitalist regime in Iran — murdered 1,200 people that day, three-quarters of them civilians. They wounded thousands, kidnapped more than 250 hostages and raped and mutilated dozens of women.
Combating Jew-hatred is not just a question in the Middle East. A pro-Hamas group in Madrid is planning a conference there Oct. 7 this year to celebrate the “glorious” one-year anniversary of the Hamas-led assault.
The stakes are high for working people. Under the guise of “anti-Zionism,” thugs threaten, vandalize and attack Jews on museum boards, Jewish-owned businesses and Jewish students who defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews. Tomorrow many of them will use the reactionary banner of Jew-hatred to target the trade unions and other workers fighting for their rights.
But Tehran and Hamas and their apologists around the world underestimated the will and fighting spirit of working people and others in Israel — Jewish and Arab citizens alike.
Risks of all-out war with Hezbollah
Israelis are preparing for the possibility of a full-scale war in Lebanon. Hezbollah reportedly has 150,000 missiles — 10 times more than Hamas had before Oct. 7. Unlike Hamas’ rockets, which are mostly rudimentary and imprecise, a large part of Hezbollah’s have precision guidance systems.
The Wall Street Journal reported July 18 that Israeli officials are preparing for barrages of up to 4,000 rockets a day — and thousands of casualties.
Israel’s Fire and Rescue Services is training more than 150 civilian response teams within 18 miles of the border with Lebanon, the Journal reported. Similar efforts are underway in Haifa, a city of nearly 300,000 — both Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel — 20 miles from the border.
After the Houthi drone attack, an article in Tasnim, the daily newspaper of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, warned that the axis of resistance “has new surprises for the Zionist enemy.”
Hamas is the biggest obstacle
In Gaza, Hamas pressures civilians not to evacuate, so they can be used as human shields and to create “martyrs” it can use as propaganda against Israel. Its false claims of “genocide” are repeated in the liberal press in the U.S.
Hamas is the biggest obstacle working people in Gaza and the West Bank face to be able to organize to fight for their rights.
Amin Abed has been an opponent of Hamas since it seized dictatorial power in Gaza in 2007. He has denounced Oct. 7 and recently posted on Facebook that Hamas “has grown arrogant and is fighting with us until the last child amongst us.” That was enough for Hamas thugs to beat him so severely in Jabalya July 8 that he ended up in intensive care at Al Awda Hospital.
In another sign of resistance to Hamas, some passersby tried to intervene, Abed told Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya News, but backed off when the thugs fired in the air. Eventually residents were able to wheel him in a cart to the hospital.
Colonial settler state?
Apologists for Tehran and Hamas around the world — aided by the liberal bourgeois news media and capitalist politicians — try to paint Israel as a “colonial settler” state that is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
They never mention why Israel exists. Leading up to World War II Adolf Hitler walked into power in Germany because of the betrayal of the Communist Party, which along with the Social Democrats, refused to lead a fight against the Nazis. In Germany and other countries, Stalinist Communist Parties prevented working people from organizing to take power into their own hands, despite opportunities to overturn capitalist rule before and after the war.
During the war, the Nazi murder machine slaughtered 40% of the world’s entire Jewish population. But the imperialist powers like Washington and Britain, turned away Jews fleeing the Nazis, before, during and after the war.
Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath had nowhere else to go.
Today, despite being a capitalist class-divided country, Israel is the only place in the world where Jews, from anywhere, can find sanctuary in face of persecution and violence. But as long as imperialism exists, constantly breeding the conditions that cause Jew-hatred, there will be no safe haven. To achieve that will take a socialist revolution.