In December 1985, I travelled to Maseru, capital of the sovereign state of Lesotho. I was an emerging photojournalist sent to cover the assassination of two people in their home. The assassins were from the defence force of SA, itself a sovereign country. The crossborder attack was endorsed, justified or at least considered to be permissible by the US and Britain because, it was said at the time that SA was fighting a war against “terrorists”. The sovereignty of Lesotho was rendered irrelevant.
Recent exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah have been between a state and a nonstate actor. In this situation the state, a legal sovereign entity, has the right to defend itself from external attacks. It is not the Lebanese state that is attacking Israel, but Hezbollah. This is what we learn from daily reports. There is little reason not to believe it. The state of Israel is violating the sovereignty of Lebanon, and the Lebanese should have the legal right to defend their sovereignty. It will probably not happen.
When SA sent military personnel to kill the couple in Maseru the justification was that they were members of a nonstate actor based in Lesotho. The people of Lesotho should have had the right to defend their sovereignty. It did not happen. The parallels and homologies between the Israel-Lebanon and SA-Lesotho attacks are startling. However, SA’s cross-border strikes were portentous of a losing battle at home.
Within two years of Pretoria’s cross-border attack the apartheid state verged on collapse. Within another two or three years the state was forced to concede defeat. This brings me to suggestions that the Israeli state is reaching its nadir. It’s difficult to believe that. There are at least two likely scenarios. One is that like the apartheid state in the late 1980s the Israeli state will come apart within the next decade. This will probably have devastating social and moral consequences. A second scenario is that the Israeli state will prevail. This scenario seems more likely.
Concede defeat
It is hard to envisage what would happen if Israel loses its war and collapses. It is a theoretical possibility. The US lost its war against the Vietnamese in the early 1970s because politicians gradually lost public support for the war when they sought to control the media narrative while overriding decisions by military officers. The key is that politicians have to get the public behind political objectives and leave military operations to soldiers.
It is hard to envisage what would happen if Israel loses its war and collapses.
The Israeli political leaders are too deeply imbricated in ground and air offensives. To lose the war the Israelis would have to concede defeat. That is difficult to imagine, if only because of the projected sanctity of Israel’s cause. Such a concession would, in Nietzschean terms, mean God is dead. God’s promise has been presented as the basis of the Israeli state.
What is more likely is that Israel will prevail. It will not be pleasant, and is likely to expand horizontally and intensify vertically; there will be more deaths over greater swathes of territory, and with increased brutality. The images from Gaza show that the Israelis have “done a Dresden”, and almost completely destroyed Palestinian homes and institutions. In the days before the US-led Operation Desert Storm a general was quoted to have said (in the context of the technological precision of military operations); “We cannot do Dresden”. The Israelis chose the Dresden option.
The totality of such destruction, reminiscent of holocausts over more than two centuries, is a shift towards what has been described as “collective acts of barbarism”. This reference was to the Sack of Magdeburg on May 20 1631, when the imperial army and forces of the Catholic League reduced the city to a wasteland, with only the cathedral and no more than 100 homes in the surrounding area spared.
Violent repression
This total destruction was replicated when the allies bombed Germany in 1942 (notably Dresden), and when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is also reminiscent of a type of “terror bombing”, put forward by Lord Cherwell (Frederick Lindemann), Winston Churchill’s main scientific adviser, who proposed “the strategic bombing of Germany [to be] directed essentially against German working-class houses … it would be possible … to destroy 50% of all houses”.
Despite moral or political opposition, Israel will prevail. The world’s main powers and players have backed the Israelis. Protests for a “Free Palestine” have been met, most alarmingly in Germany, with violent repression and censorship. The Israeli military have apparently also abandoned or ignored conventions such as sparing the wounded, respecting flags of truce, and honouring surrender. They have also wilfully moved masses of civilians and destroyed social and cultural institutions such as schools, hospitals, places of worship, universities and museums.
All of this will probably continue. It may be because there is no transcultural consensus on the ethics of war; in which one side can kill, maim and destroy as much as it likes, and the other side is in a war against God’s wishes.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
