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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain


When the shooting stops…

Hezbollah has forced Israel to cease-fire – but not on Zionist terms. The Lebanese resistance movement has achieved a strategic success by thwarting the Zionist plans to drive the resistance and the UN peace-keeping force out of southern Lebanon and replace it with an Israeli-occupied “buffer zone” to pave the way for annexation.

Many towns in Lebanon are now in ruins. The Israelis pounded Beirut and the other towns and cities of the Lebanon for over a year forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians to abandon their homes in waves of terror bombing designed to break the morale of the Arab resistance. But they failed. They themselves paid a heavy price for their aggression. Some 300,000 Israelis fled to safety out of the range of the drones and missiles of the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. Over 100 Zionist settlements in northern Israel were evacuated. The “Generals’ Plan” for Gaza has been put on hold. The dream of a “Greater Israel” died in the fields of southern Lebanon.

After the imperialist inspired “Arab Spring” swept across the Arab world, destabilising countries one by one and paving the way for normalisation with Israel, came the imperialist attempt to “regime change” Syria. Terror gangs armed and funded by the Americans and their NATO allies fermented sectarian violence and civil war in an attempt to overthrow the Baathist-led government in Damascus. The Western media went into top gear to justify imperialist intervention, spreading lies throughout Europe and the USA while the Arab world became a battleground for one of the most ruthless propaganda wars in modern history. This was the first conflict to weaponise social media, exploiting it to deepen the divide between the Shia and Sunni Muslim communities and to fracture the unity between the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance.

Syria, the lifeline of the resistance’s weapons pipeline, was targeted for destruction. But the Syrians closed ranks around their popular front government to beat back the sectarian militias and with the help of Russian peace-keepers drove the terror gangs and their Western military advisors out of most of the country. But the fabricated narrative of “Hezbollah’s crimes in Syria”, heavily propagated by the feudal Arab media, continues to serve as a tool to attack Hezbollah and the entire Axis of Resistance to this day.

Although the guns fall silent in Lebanon the Yemeni blockade continues and the Palestinians fight on. They have no other choice. The Israelis are continuing to pursue their genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that has now become a wilderness of rubble and ruins. The Zionists still dream of driving all the Palestinian Arabs out to seize their land and make room for more Zionist settlements.

Nevertheless, the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon could pave the way for a similar agreement in Gaza – but only if there’s mass pressure in the Western world to force the imperialist leaders to recognise the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs. Over the last 14 months millions in Britain have rallied to demand justice for the Palestinians. It’s already having an effect on the people in the corridors of power. We must keep up the momentum for as long as it takes. If Starmer will not speak up for the people living through a genocide in Gaza and under siege in the West Bank, then we absolutely must continue to raise our voices for them.