David Finkel
Posted April 20, 2026
APRIL 16 — IF the war on Iran ended right now, by all accounts it would take many months to stop the ever-greater damage to the world economy, particularly but not exclusively to nations of the Global South and Asia. Repairing energy production and infrastructure in the Gulf is probably the work of years.
This is not counting thousands of lives already lost in Iran and Lebanon, and irreplaceable.
Following the April 16 announcement of a Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in Lebanon, the Iranian government stated that the Strait of Hormuz is open to commercial shipping. According to Trump. the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports remains in effect. What any of this means in real life was not immediately clear. The backlog of ships in the Gulf, skyrocketing insurance costs, and looming shortages of essential commodities from fertilizer to helium to jet fuel, are all threats to the world economy on scales difficult to measure. If nothing else constrains Trump from renewing full-scale war with Iran, the prospect of chaos in financial markets might do so. But Netanyahu proclaimed that ceasefire or no, Israel “will stay” in Lebanon indefinitely if not permanently, and most of the million displaced Lebanese have no homes to return to, or ways to get there.
This past Monday, April 12, on Canadian Broadcasting’s nightly news, their sharp economic correspondent Peter Armstrong was asked why financial markets and oil prices seem to be stabilizing or even improving amidst such a crisis.
His answer in brief: Yes, the markets and the experts know that the situation is a disaster. But it’s actually such an enormous disaster that they’ve calculated that something simply has to be done to resolve it.
While we’re waiting, that should make us all feel better already.
It’s pointless in any case to try to interpret daily, even hourly pronouncements of whether another round of blockades, negotiations, extended ceasefires, or anything else may or may not be happening. Whatever deals are made with Iran are likely to be secret anyway.
In an article posted April 14 on the Solidarity website, I addressed the tricky question of whether the present catastrophe was launched as “A ‘War for Israel’?” While the answer is fundamentally “No,” the spreading nightmare demands that we look closely at the U.S.-Israeli strategic partnership, its relationship to the Gulf oil kingdoms, and the contradictions embedded within it.
First I will focus on a still-underreported dimension of the war, Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, its ambitions, and the looming consequences if Israel’s government isn’t quickly forced to step back.
While an antiwar movement is reviving inside Israel, with courageous weekly demonstrations confronting severe police violence, in the absence of outside political intervention it’s not nearly large enough to force a change.
Ethnic Cleansing and Annexationism
Israel’s military objectives in Lebanon are ostensibly aimed at defensively “disarming Hezbollah” and restoring security to the towns of northern Israel, but actions on the ground reveal far more ambitious transformative goals.
Israel previously occupied southern Lebanon for almost two decades (1982-2000) after expelling the Palestinian forces there, attempting to rule through a puppet militia called the South Lebanese Army until the anger of the population and guerilla resistance led by the Shia-based Hezbollah forced the Israeli retreat.
Actually, Israeli air power over Lebanon and ground incursions have never been absent, leading to periodic confrontations including the 2006 “33-day war” and subsequent episodes including of course the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership after October 2023.
But the pure physical destruction and mass population removal in the south since the present occupation began has exceeded that of the 18 years at the end of the 20th century.
A million Lebanese are already displaced, and whole villages and towns not only forcibly depopulated but razed with U.S.-supplied monster military bulldozers, with the clear intent of making return impossible. (The U.S. Senate has again rejected resolutions to block the sale of these bulldozers.)
Fourteen thousand homes have been reduced to rubble. Reportedly in some cases while Muslim Shia villages are destroyed, Christian villagers are told they can remain but warned not to rent to displaced Muslim neighbors or they’ll be bombed too. The same terror warnings against housing Muslim refugees are said to be happening in Beirut where tens or hundreds of thousands have fled and now shelter under bridges or in makeshift encampments.
If the intentions of permanent occupation weren’t clear from Israel’s actions — up to and possibly including actual annexation of a zone in southern Lebanon — the statements of its generals and politicians, and not only from the extreme right, have confirmed them. In one form or another, the changes aren’t intended to be temporary.
Without any doubt, this onslaught is proceeding under a U.S. license and time frame, as the leading Israeli military analyst Amos Harel states:
“The common denominator of these reports is a game of buying time, and we are in its final stages. Israel is waiting for a possible final whistle by the Americans that would signal the end of the war in Lebanon, and possibly Iran. In the meantime, Israel is trying to make gains on the ground, while its ambassador is in direct negotiations with Lebanon in Washington.” (Haaretz, April 16)
That same day, under U.S. pressure, a ceasefire in Lebanon was been announced. It was celebrated in Beirut, but history gives little reason to expect Israel to honor it.
Consequences
The foreseeable consequences of an extended Israeli occupation in Lebanon are dire:
• The human cost begins with thousands of civilians already killed, including more than 350 in the first day of bombing Beirut, not including unrecovered bodies buried in the ruins. This tragedy is compounded by enormous deliberate damage to hospitals and medical clinics.
• Without an early cessation of these attacks, the viability of the Lebanese state and its very existence as a society are at risk. Indeed, the potential disintegration of Lebanon (and other regional states including Syria) may be an ultimate Israeli ideological objective, but runs counter to the U.S. objective of a “stable” Middle East order under its imperial domination.
• Israeli occupation means that resistance, whether from Hezbollah or whatever force succeeds it, will not go away. Israel’s “security” doctrine will impel the occupation zone to expand, compounding the disaster at each new phase.
• The growing pressure on Israel’s conscript military, and especially the reserve forces already stretched near the limit from the Gaza genocide, are liable to reach a breaking point. That would pose a choice for Israel, either withdrawal or brutal further escalation. Under its current government or any likely replacement, the latter option is by far likelier unless the peace movement expands explosively.
Amidst all this, the Gaza genocide continues by global neglect, slow starvation and near-daily Israeli bombing and assassinations with impunity.
These are only implications that can be predicted with little specialized insight. Then there are the “unknown unknowns” of what might happen if the catastrophe spreads across borders into countries like Syria and Jordan, if the Yemeni Houthi movement moves to block Red Sea shipping, if Turkey were to intervene directly, etc.
Those consequences can range from ethnic internal wars and state breakdowns to the global economic meltdown that those aforementioned market speculators are assuming will somehow, some way be avoided. The damage caused by four-dollar-a-gallon gas and inflation is the least of it.
Partnership and Contradictions
Beyond the sadistic savagery of what U.S. imperialism and Israel are doing, these confusing and frightening dynamics point to the depth of the U.S.-Israeli strategic partnership and its contradictions.
In the briefest terms, an American-imposed Middle East order is predicated on Israel’s unchallenged military and technological pre-eminence in the region, including a U.S. subsidy which Israel also effectively leverages into a prospering economy on a western European scale.
The regional ruling classes of the Arab states are to play important although junior roles in this structure, which is what the “Abraham Accords” are about.
Yet at the same time, Israel’s drive to complete the Zionist movement’s goal of completing the conquest of Palestine — and the extension of that drive into neighboring states — becomes a permanent destabilizing element.
That’s not because imperialism cares about the fate of Palestine, to which it’s entirely indifferent, but because Israeli aggression and ethnic cleansing, to say nothing of genocide, is a permanent cause of explosive popular anger in the region and increasingly, internationally.
In the final analysis, U.S. imperialism has the capacity to constrain Israel and on a number of occasions has done so, but it is politically costly and risky for any administration to do so.
The huge (although gradually declining) power in Congress of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) as the leading Zionist lobby organization is obviously a major and well publicized factor.
But the biggest force in imposing U.S. policy support for Israel’s occupation, annexation and wars, as the Israeli government itself is fully aware, are the tens of millions of Christian Zionists in the United States with their voting power and theological convictions that the “Jewish state” fulfills Biblical prophecy and signals the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
This isn’t the place to unravel the irrational absurdity of these claims, or their murky connections to Donald Trump’s recent postings of himself as Christ-like or Jesus-adjacent. But the contradictions of the U.S.-Israeli partnership, as both a pivot of imperialist policy and a destabilizing factor, are now feeding back into U.S. politics.
From the very beginning, the criminal and illegal U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has been unpopular in the United States. It has become ever more so as the lies surrounding it become exposed: that the Iran regime posed an “imminent threat”; that its defeat and overthrow would happen quickly; and above all that the war would be a huge and cost-free “victory” as Trump’s Venezuela kidnapping operation had been.
The gruesome realities of the war, the consequences of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and especially the false but understandable perception that the United States “went to war for Israel,” have fuelled mixed and confused responses.
While the growth of antiwar anger and pro-Palestinian sympathy is absolutely positive and progressive, there’s also a toxic rise in open anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred from MAGA and neo-nazi corners of the far right. The danger to both Jewish and Muslim religious and community spaces is clearly growing.
We can only briefly note that the war and cutoff of Gulf oil supplies has benefitted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at least temporarily. Escalating oil prices and Trump’s lifting of sanctions against Russian oil sales have swelled the coffers of Putin’s war machine.
The near-cutoff of U.S. weapons for Ukraine, as they’re poured into Israel and U.S. military bases in the Middle East, has also harmed Ukraine. At the same time, however, Russia’s military gains on the ground have stalled or even reversed, and Ukrainian drone attacks have seriously cut into Russia’s oil production capacity.
(A statement from the Ukraine Solidarity Network on the war and the collusion between Trump and Putin against Ukraine is on the USN’s website.)
It is all the more important for the May Day mobilizations to pose a progressive alternative to war, linked to the defense of our democratic rights, immigrant communities and vulnerable Queer and trans people, and essential social services slated for sacrifice on the altar of Trump’s $1.5 trillion arms budget.
May-June 2026, ATC 242
