Public Meeting: Middle East: Heading Towards a Regional War?

antrim | worker & community struggles and protests | event notice Saturday July 22, 2006 12:22 by A - Socialist Party socialistpartyni at btconnect dot com 02890232962

Hear a socialist analysis

7.30pm Wed 26th July
13 Lombard St (next to the Monico Bar) Belfast

Tel 90232962 for more details

THE ISRAELI government is in the process of implementing its threat to bomb the Lebanon back twenty years. Airports, roads, buildings and, not least, hundreds of human lives have already been destroyed. Workers and young people around the world were already sickened by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) attacks on Gaza, but what has taken place in the last few days is a massive escalation of the nightmarish crisis in the Middle East.

The situation is spiralling towards all-out war; with the danger of a conflagration across the Middle East. If this process isn't halted it will be the working-class and poor, from every nationality and ethnic and religious grouping, that will pay a terrible price - as the last few days have so graphically demonstrated. While it is Lebanese and Palestinians workers and poor who have suffered the greatest loss of life over recent days, ordinary Israelis have also been victims, like the railway workers killed by a rocket in Haifa.

The Bush regime, with Blair wagging his tail behind, has already been responsible for massively destabilising the Middle East via the war and occupation of Iraq for oil. Now Bush and Blair have responded to the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon by laying the blame at the foot of the 'terrorist' Hezbollah and turning a blind eye to the crimes of the IDF. In other words they have given the Israeli regime a green light to continue stepping up the bloodshed.

In reality the current brutal assault, even if the IDF pull back before provoking all-out war, will only increase support for Hezbollah and also Hamas.

However, neither of these groups will be able to solve the basic problems of the masses on the basis of what would be, if they had their way, capitalist religious regimes.

Capitalism offers no way forward for the peoples of the Middle East. In addition to the brutal suppression of national and religious rights; workers in the region have also suffered relentless attacks on their living standards over the last decade. The Arab regimes are corrupt, undemocratic, and brutal.
Both the Arab and Israeli regimes are the willing agents of imperialist inspired, massive attacks on the living standards of the working class and poor peasantry in the region.

Struggle for Socialism
The huge anger that exists against the pernicious role of imperialism needs to be channelled in the direction of building new working class movements and parties, based on the ideas of a socialist confederation of the Middle East, the removal of all imperialist armed forces, and the overthrow of capitalism and feudalism in the region.

War, terrorism, conflict and instability are all increasingly the norm in a capitalist system that is riven by crisis. To permanently end the threat of war and terror we have to fight for the end of capitalism and for the establishment of a democratic socialist world run in the interests of the billions instead of for the profits of the billionaires.