Israeli forces have dealt severe blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and to Tehran’s anti-aircraft defense system. These victories were possible because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to give in to pressure by President Joseph Biden’s administration to exercise “restraint”; and to the wide support in Israel for his course and the morale of Israeli soldiers who understand what is at stake.
This has advanced the war to defend Israel as a refuge for Jews and to prevent more pogroms and another Holocaust, but the war is far from over. The reactionary bourgeois regime in Iran is driving ahead toward making a nuclear bomb, a move Netanyahu has said Israel will not allow. The Houthis in Yemen continue to fire ballistic missiles at Israel.
At the end of November Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization chief reported that Tehran has started up a few thousand new centrifuges. This would allow the production of uranium close to weapons-grade levels. If even one Iranian nuclear warhead made it through Israel’s anti-missile defenses, it would be devastating. Ten million people live in Israel — including nearly half the Jews in the world — in an area smaller than Vermont.
Israel’s Channel 12 news reported Dec. 29 that computers captured in Gaza show Hamas and Tehran had been preparing the Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom that killed 1,200 people for at least seven years. Hamas hacked security cameras on the border. It had the addresses of people it planned to target as well as schools and health clinics.
The pogrom was meant to be the opening of the battle to destroy Israel and evict or kill all the Jews there.
Israel: a refuge for Jews
In an interview with Netanyahu in the Dec. 21 Wall Street Journal, the Israeli prime minister gets at some of the central questions. In describing a crucial stage of the war against Hamas, Netanyahu notes U.S. officials “said to me, ‘If you go into Rafah, you’re on your own, and we’re not going to send you the critical arms.’”
“But if we don’t go into Rafah, we can’t exist as a sovereign state. We’d become a vassal state and we won’t survive,” Netanyahu said. “The question of arms will fix itself, but the question of our independence will not. That’s the end of Israel.”
Washington’s goal is not to defend Jews, but stability for its own imperialist economic and political interests, including the Biden administration’s goal of better relations with Tehran. Netanyahu, a capitalist politician, seeks U.S. imperialist aid, but he understands that if Israel is to survive, it must be willing to fight on its own.
The Israel Defense Forces occupied Rafah with minimal civilian Palestinian casualties, despite Washington’s predictions of 20,000 deaths. Israel followed this up with surprise attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon — again over U.S. objections.
A layer of Israeli officials in the army high command, police agencies and in rival political parties look to U.S. imperialism, hoping it will “correct” Netanyahu. They pressure the Israeli government to fall in more closely behind the U.S. rulers’ foreign policy.
The Journal interview helps make clear what’s behind today’s witch hunt against Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption. One of his aides, Eli Feldstein, soldier Ari Rosenfeld and three other soldiers have been arrested on allegations of stealing classified documents that senior officials had kept hidden from Netanyahu.
The main “highly classified” document, given to German tabloid Bild, was a report by Hamas officials found on the computer of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar! It shows Hamas was not interested in a deal to free the hostages it seized, but in using them and their families to increase international pressure on Israel to end the war, leaving Hamas intact for more pogroms.
For years Israel’s capitalist government has been responsible for the fact that Arab citizens of Israel have faced, and fought against, unequal treatment by the Israeli rulers. But a recent poll shows that 57.8% of Arab citizens in Israel, including Muslims, Druze and Christians, believe the war against Tehran’s “axis of resistance” has created a shared sense of destiny between Jews and Arabs.
The decisive defeat of Hamas and Hezbollah and Tehran’s plans to destroy Israel can further open the doors to common action by working people of all nationalities and religious beliefs across the region, a needed road forward.