Israel threatens to extend its War to the Region

April 14, 2024

Statement of the League for the Fifth International

On April 13, Iran launched 300 drones and ballistic missiles at Israel. The great majority was brought down by Israel’s sophisticated air defence systems, but also with the aid of American, British and French forces stationed in the region as well as Jordan and Saudi-Arabia.

US President Joe Biden, who has continued to arm and defend Israel’s six months of genocide in Gaza, naturally rushed to say, “I condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms.” He added: “I’ve just spoken with Prime Minister Netanyahu to reaffirm America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel.”

In fact, Iran’s attack was a response to a far more damaging provocation from Israel. On April 1, Israeli warplanes fired multiple missiles demolishing the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital Damascus, killing Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), another Iranian general and 13 more people.

Military analysts say that the Iranian strikes were deliberately chosen in a way that could be easily defended by Israeli and allied air and missile defence. Also, the targets seem to be not population centres but rather some remote military targets on the Golan Heights and in the Negev desert. The whole attack was highly symbolic, aimed to uphold “deterrence” against further Israeli attacks. Following in this line, the spokesperson of the Iranian mission to the UN also declared that they see the Damascus affair as “settled” with this retaliation.

It is very unlikely that the Israeli government sees it the same way. For them, the Iranians fell into a trap that they had laid out with the Damascus provocation. An involvement of the main regional enemy is what the Netanyahu government needs to prove its military strength and to escalate the Gaza war into one with any force in the region that could possibly support the Palestinian resistance. As one Israeli official put it, now is the time to extinguish the capacity of Iran to present any threat towards Israel.

The transformation of the Gaza genocide into a regional war, long warned against also by the United States, thus took a major step forward. It is clear that this is a deliberate provocation by Netanyahu’s war cabinet, aimed not just at Iran, but at embroiling his American and Western European allies more directly.

It is also a means of escaping from the problems caused by the large-scale demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem calling for his resignation. In addition, he was briefly embarrassed by international media condemnation regarding the IDF massacre of the World Central Kitchen workers delivering aid on April 1. Its allies can now return to the “Israel has a right to defend itself” propaganda.

The danger that Israel, a nuclear power, with the most sophisticated conventional armament in the Middle East, will go all out in an attack on Iran, Lebanon and Syria is a very real one.

Meanwhile, genocide is ongoing in Gaza. In the three days of Eid-ul-Fitr (the celebration that normally marks the end of the month-long fasting for Muslims in Ramadan), the IDF committed massacres of whole families killing over 170 women and children. At the same time, 72 Israeli settlers, under protection of IDF soldiers, went on what the BBC called “a rampage” in the occupied West Bank. This pogrom involved burning cars, houses, shops, destroying entire streets and more.

All this shows that far from being contained or weakened, the Zionist state is hell-bent on committing what its ministers have called a “second Nakba”. This could involve the long-awaited ground invasion of Rafah, clearing Gaza of its traumatised population or herding them into an even smaller prison camp, and on the West Bank into the isolated, overcrowded urban areas while fascistic settlers kill villagers and occupy what is left of Palestinian agricultural land.

The worldwide movement against the genocide, already unparalleled in its longevity and size needs to go beyond protests. It needs to exert irresistible pressure on the governments, in the Western imperialist countries as well as the Middle Eastern monarchies and military dictatorships to cut off all aid arms’ supplies and economic ties to Israel. Mass direct action needs to be mounted, setting off the rejection of bogus claims that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, a fact increasingly exposed by the growing number of progressive Jewish people who condemn Israel’s actions.

For the US, British, German and other Western governments, one thing is clear: they are firmly behind the Israeli state. This makes an escalation of the war and a massive attack against Iran, Syria or Lebanon a real danger.

We stand clearly against such Zionist attacks! We stand firmly against any imperialist intervention!

We stand for the immediate withdrawal of all US and other imperialist troops from the Middle East! We are for the closure of all imperialist military bases!