Defending my enemy's enemy
www.threewayfight.blogspot.com


Question to the U.S. left and anti-war movement about the current war in
Lebanon: If we want Israel to fail in its stated objective to destroy
Hezbollah, does that mean we want Hezbollah to win?

The Israeli attacks on Lebanon are a mass atrocity, a calculated,
long-planned campaign of terror that is inflicting vastly more suffering
on civilians in Lebanon than Israelis are facing from Hezbollah missiles.
Since 1978, Israel has invaded or occupied Lebanon repeatedly and has
killed tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. This is closely bound up
with the long history of Israeli land theft, persecution, and mass
violence against the Palestinian people, and the current Lebanon war is
bound up with the latest Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank. In
these attacks, the Israeli state has acted largely as U.S. imperialism's
number one client and proxy, its actions interlinked with Washington's
occupation of Iraq.

So let's be clear: We have a pressing responsibility to defend the
Lebanese people, demand an immediate end to Israeli attacks, and expose
the deadly U.S. role in the conflict.

But let's be clear about something else too: The fact that Israel and the
United States want to destroy Hezbollah does not make it a positive
political force. To be sure, Hezbollah has staunchly resisted Israeli
aggression for years. It runs a sizeable network of social services and
has a solid base of popular support centered in the largely poor Shi'i
community but cutting across denominational lines. Yet no matter how
courageous its fighters may be, no matter how many schools and hospitals
it runs, Hezbollah is essentially a right-wing political movement. Its
guiding ideology is Khomeini-style Islamic fundamentalism. Hezbollah's
political ideal, the Islamic Republic of Iran, enforces medieval religious
law, imposes brutal strictures on women and LGBT people, persecutes
religious and ethnic minorities, and has executed tens of thousands of
leftists and other political dissenters. This is not exactly a liberatory
model.

In the framework of our basic opposition to the Israeli attacks, it's
important for us to be open about our political criticisms of Hezbollah.
That doesn't mean echoing the U.S. government/mass media line -- criticism
doesn't mean demonization. Even if we accept that some Hezbollah armed
actions have wrongly targeted civilians, it's transparent nonsense to say
that Hezbollah is a group of "terrorists" and Israel is just trying to
defend itself. It's quite possible that Hezbollah sometimes engages in
anti-Jewish scapegoating, but the organization is not continuing Hitler's
work and does not exist in order to kill Jews. Rather than try to impose
Islamic rule on Lebanon by force, Hezbollah has repeatedly acknowledged
the country's pluralistic character. And Hezbollah is not the root cause
of the conflict with Israel. It is primarily a response -- a deeply flawed
one -- to Israeli and western aggression in Lebanon and the Middle East,
and to the oppression of the Shi'i community.

Among the statements on the Lebanon war I've seen so far from U.S. leftist
and anti-war groups, most condemn the Israeli attacks against the Lebanese
people but say little or nothing about Hezbollah's politics. Two notable
exceptions are the Workers World Party and the Spartacist League, both in
statements dated July 21, 2006. Workers World describes Hezbollah as the
leader of a "national resistance movement" and argues that, for both
Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas, Islam "is the ideological form
whose actual content is the struggle against imperialism." An article
published in Workers World newspaper four days later describes Hezbollah
as "a guerrilla resistance army with Islamic leadership" which "gained
wide political legitimacy for its determined resistance and its
well-organized, non-corrupt social services."

The Spartacist League takes Workers World to task for "prettifying"
Hezbollah in this manner, and notes that during the Cold War both the
United States and Israel "fostered the growth of Islamic reaction as a
counterweight to Communism and secular nationalism." The Spartacists
declare, "As Trotskyists, we in the Spartacist League militarily defend
Hezbollah against the Israeli military machine in this conflict, while
maintaining our political opposition to this reactionary fundamentalist
outfit."

I know it's not popular to say nice things about the Sparts, but on this
issue they take a good position and Workers World takes a bad one. To
treat Hezbollah as anti-imperialist while glossing over its right-wing
religious ideology is dishonest, simplistic, and short sighted from a
propaganda standpoint, because it leaves you open to easy critique. The
Spartacists' double-edged position -- we oppose Hezbollah's politics but
defend them against Israeli attack -- respects people's intelligence more
and offers U.S. activists a clearer and more principled way of relating to
the conflict. It acknowledges the war's political complexity, instead of
reducing it to Good Guys versus Bad Guys, but it also doesn't treat the
two sides as equivalent or mirror images -- it takes a stand.

What's missing from the Spartacist League position, however, is a clear
recognition that Hezbollah is both right wing and anti-imperialist. I
don't mean Hezbollah is inconsistent -- I mean its opposition to Zionism
and its U.S. patron is rooted in a right-wing philosophy. This doesn't fit
conventional leftist categories, but it's not unique. Although the Islamic
right was helped by the United States and Israel during the Cold War,
today it includes some of the most militant and strategically important
opponents of these same governments. (Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda are
other prominent examples, very distinct from each other and from
Hezbollah.) We may not like this situation, but we need to find ways to
understand it and deal with it.

The title of this essay refers to the book My Enemy's Enemy (Kersplebedeb,
2001), which warned that far-right politics were strong and growing within
the anti-globalization movement -- and that many leftists were wittingly
or unwittingly complicit in fostering this growth. My Enemy's Enemy helped
crystallize the concept of a "three-way fight" to describe the global
political situation. Instead of an essentially binary struggle between
right and left, between the forces of oppression and the forces of
liberation, three-way fight politics posits a more complex struggle
centered on the global capitalist ruling class, the revolutionary left,
and the revolutionary right. The latter encompasses various kinds of
fascists and other far rightists who want to replace the dominance of
global capital with a different kind of oppressive social order. This
means there is no guarantee that militant challenges to global capitalism
-- including popular anti-imperialist struggles -- will take a progressive
or liberatory form.

Three-way fight politics is still a new and primitive analytic tool, but I
think it's an important framework for discussion and a helpful corrective
to oversimplifications that are common on the left. The Lebanon war
highlights the concept's usefulness as well as the need to develop it
further. Three-way fight politics has largely been used to draw a line
between leftist and rightist versions of insurgent politics, to help
leftists recognize the differences and warn them against dangerous
alliances. Sometimes -- as with the anti-globalization movement -- that's
exactly what's needed. But sometimes -- as with the Israeli attacks on
Hezbollah and the people of Lebanon -- what we need to do is defend
rightist forces, in specific ways and specific situations, against a
greater political threat. My enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend,
but sometimes we need to defend people who are not our friends.

This approach to the Lebanon war raises many questions that I won't try to
answer here. Within the basic outlines I've presented, what does critical
defense of Hezbollah include and what does it exclude? What kinds of
tactics and slogans best represent this position? Beyond the immediate
situation, when does this kind of stance make sense, and when is it
counterproductive? How, concretely, does it differ from solidarity with
leftist forces? Given that right-wing anti-imperialist fighters are tying
down U.S. imperialism and its allies in several countries, to what extent,
if any, could this widen the space for liberatory movements? Such
questions merit serious discussion, and that can only happen if we go
beyond a simplistic Us-versus-Them model of politics. George Bush declared
after September 11th: Either you are with us or against us. Surely we can
do better than that.