The Israeli and Lebanese governments announced a ceasefire Nov. 26, which was signed onto by the leaders in Tehran and by Hezbollah. The agreement — if honored — is an advance for Israel’s fight to defend its existence as a refuge from Jew-hatred and pogroms. It is a product of the big blows Israelis have dealt Hamas, Hezbollah and the reactionary bourgeois regime in Iran since Oct. 7, 2023.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a Nov. 26 video address to the people of Israel that the ceasefire will allow them to “complete the task of obliterating Hamas” in Gaza. And it puts the Israeli people in a better position to “prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
“Removing that threat is the most important mission to ensure the existence and future of the State of Israel.”
Under the terms of the 13-point accord brokered with the participation of Washington and Paris, over the next 60 days Hezbollah will withdraw all its forces from southern Lebanon to north of the Litani River, and Israeli troops will gradually withdraw to Israel — with 10,000 Lebanese army soldiers taking their place to assure Hezbollah does not return.
Remaining Hezbollah rocket launchers, weapons stores and its other military infrastructure in the south are to be destroyed. And Hezbollah is not to procure any new weapons.
A side agreement by Washington declares that the U.S. government recognizes Israel’s “right to act at any time” against violations of the accord in southern Lebanon and against direct threats from anywhere else in the country.
“If Hezbollah violates the agreement and tries to arm itself, we will attack,” Netanyahu said. “If it launches a rocket, if it digs a tunnel, if it brings in a truck carrying rockets, we will attack.”
Driving the point home, Israeli forces hit over 300 Hezbollah sites in the 11 hours before the ceasefire took effect, from the Syrian border to Beirut to southern Lebanon.
At a press conference in Beirut, Hezbollah leader Mahmoud Qomati argued that the ceasefire is a “victory and the enemy did not achieve any of its goals.”
Sardar Mohammad Jaafar Asadi, a senior official of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had a more sober view. “Although this truce is not 100% favorable to us, we welcome and support it,” he told Tasnim news agency. Tehran and Hezbollah hope they — as well as Hamas and the rest of the Tehran-funded and -organized “axis of resistance” — can recover from their defeats and begin quietly violating the accord to rearm and prepare for future attempts to destroy Israel and eliminate all the Jews.
Hezbollah started the war
The war in Lebanon began Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah — at the urging of Tehran — attacked northern Israel with drones and missiles. They said this was in “solidarity” with Hamas, which had murdered 1,200 men, women and children in Israel the day before. The Hamas death squads also wounded thousands, took 250 hostages and raped and mutilated dozens of women. It was the largest anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust.
Hezbollah’s daily attacks forced 60,000 Israeli citizens — Jews and Arabs alike — to evacuate their homes and farms in northern Israel. A thousand homes there have been damaged and 45 civilians killed.
Over the next year Israeli forces continued to respond to Hezbollah attacks, but held off on any major operation in Lebanon. They focused instead on dismantling Hamas to prevent it from further massacres of Jews.
Then, in a move that took Hezbollah by surprise, thousands of pagers — unwittingly purchased from a business set up by the Mossad — blew up Sept. 17. The next day the same thing happened with Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies. These operations killed more than 30 and wounded thousands of the terrorist group’s cadre and leaders.
The Israel Defense Forces followed this up with airstrikes aimed at Hezbollah sites, including one on Sept. 27 that killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s central leader. Israeli soldiers began ground attacks in southern Lebanon Oct. 1.
Tehran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Nasrallah’s death. While most were intercepted, the attack damaged more than 100 homes, a school and killed one person — a Palestinian on the West Bank. But this showed the danger that the regime in Tehran poses to Jews and Israel, even more so if the regime acquires nuclear weapons.
On Oct. 25 Israel retaliated, destroying Tehran’s main anti-missile systems, factories essential to building Iran’s ballistic missiles and a key site involved in its efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
Shortly afterward, Hezbollah — at the urging of its masters in Tehran — dropped its demand that Israel end its war on Hamas before agreeing to a ceasefire.
By the time of the ceasefire, Israel had killed 3,500 Lebanese, including at least 900 civilians. Another 886,000 fled the combat zones and 99,000 homes were damaged.
Israel defied U.S. pressure
Netanyahu said that another reason for the ceasefire was to “give our forces a breather and replenish stocks.” He was referring to the Joseph Biden administration’s relentless pressure on Israel to end the war in Gaza before Hamas is destroyed, to back off attacks on Hezbollah and refrain from attacking nuclear sites in Iran.
When Israel was preparing to enter Rafah on the Egypt-Gaza border, a decisive step in dealing blows to Hamas, “President Biden told me that if we go in, we will be alone,” Netanyahu reported to the Israeli Knesset Nov. 18. “He also said that he would stop shipments of important weapons to us. And so he did.”
While the capitalist government of Israel needs and seeks U.S. imperialism’s support, Netanyahu knows that it can’t be relied on. Washington’s only goal in the region is to advance the economic and political interests of the U.S. ruling class, not to defend Jews.
ICC promotes Jew-hatred
On Nov. 21 the so-called International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, claiming that they had committed “war crimes” in Gaza. To give the appearance of being even-handed, the court also ordered the arrest of former Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, who has been dead for months!
The stateless, U.N.-related court was created by European Union governments and others in 2002, but its authority has never been recognized by Washington or the Chinese, Israeli or Russian governments, and 65 other U.N.-member states.
The court has no authority to enforce any of its orders. It relies on member states to carry out its will. These states all act on their own national interests. Canadian Primer Minister Justin Trudeau told the press that his government will arrest the two Israeli leaders if they come there.
Of course this won’t happen, but the court’s false equivalency between Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and slaughter or expulsion of all the Jews there, and Israel, which is defending the safety of a refuge for Jews, is a sign of the depth of Jew-hatred around the world amid the deepening capitalist crisis.
The Israeli government is the only state in the world that defends Jews from attack, arms in hand. At the same time, the fight is weakened by the fact that Israel is a capitalist state. Jew-hatred is intrinsic to the imperialist epoch and it will continue to raise its head unless the working class takes political power — in Israel and Palestine, across the Middle East, in the U.S. and the world over.
Even as the regime in Iran seeks to postpone the coming showdown in the Middle East, it has openly and covertly pursued the development of nuclear weapons.
But working people in Iran are increasingly showing their disagreement with the regime’s expansionist, Jew-hating war policy in the region. Despite the regime’s efforts to whip up support for its drive against Israel, strikes and demonstrations have grown and become more visible.
Bartarinha, a news media based in Tehran, reported Nov. 27 on Netanyahu’s statement that Israel is now “changing the face of the Middle East.”