The international system’s licence to Israel to act with impunity in Gaza, and now Lebanon, will come back to haunt it. Israel has a right to defend itself. Many of the forces arrayed against it, including Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, are not on the side of humanity. But to call what Israel has unleashed in Gaza and Lebanon disproportionate would be a colossal understatement. It is a moral catastrophe. It is also strategically myopic. Lebanon has endured its worst day of bombing in 50 years. Tens of thousands of people are being displaced, innocent children killed. There is a shocking level of dehumanisation of civilians. This is being done with the complicity of Great Powers, including, one is ashamed to say, India.
Israel is a formidable military force. It has often been embattled, including by the October 7 attack. But has any war it has conducted since 1967 actually made it safer? Those wars have been, under the guise of creating “safe” zones, wars of expansion. One of Israel’s aims is, ostensibly, to create safe zones. But this is an ironic objective since it is the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements that has, in part, created proximity. Those wars have always laid the groundwork for foes that are ideologically even more hostile than their predecessors. There is an amazing American and Israeli obsession with destroying states.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah have functioned as quasi-states (in Hamas’s case, sometimes with Israeli complicity), providing political expression and welfare in part because all the great powers of the region have consistently connived to break down functioning states. The US in Libya and Iraq are two recent examples, which also had the consequence of strengthening Iran. But what does Israel expect will happen in Gaza and south Lebanon, when functioning society is destroyed, infrastructure reduced to rubble, and refugees herded to camps? Who will fill that vacuum? Israel’s actions are not self-defence, they are animated by almost a will to apocalypticism, as if the chaos and destruction will create its own security.
Take the question of Iran. It is now almost as if Israel is pushing harder to get Iran to react, and create the conditions for a wider conflict. It seems to take licence for its impunity from the fact that states like Saudi Arabia and UAE are in the enemy-of-my-enemy mode, giving Israel cover. But again, there is strategic myopia. For one thing, Saudi Arabia had its own share of exacerbating violence and creating a vacuum of authority in Yemen. Those states are misreading the silence of their populations, which is, in part, produced by repression. But most importantly, any diplomatic off-ramp in this crisis has to involve Iran. Israel’s aims are contradictory. Is the purpose of a show of force to get Iran to somehow negotiate and rein in Hezbollah? Is that compatible with a diplomatic strategy which actually gives Iran no off-ramp? Is any strategy viable with the complete isolation of Iran, as unpalatable as that regime might be? This is not war in service of a diplomatic objective. It is a war to sabotage any possible diplomacy.
The suffering in Gaza and Lebanon cannot be measured. But since that counts for little these days, think of the moral costs for Israel and the US. Amos Oz was not always the most reliable moral prognosticator. But his reflections five years after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (which is being dwarfed in intensity by this one) in Slopes of Lebanon still ring true. He wrote “amongst the victims of the Lebanon War was the Land of Israel, small and brave, determined and righteous. It died in Lebanon perhaps precisely because in Lebanon, its back was not to the wall. It was the wall, and they, the Palestinians, had their backs pressed to the wall.” And he worried about what the war would do to Israel. “After Lebanon, we can no longer ignore the monster, even when it is dormant or half asleep, or when it peers out from behind the lunatic fringe.” This worry about Israel might seem misplaced when Lebanon and Gaza are being reduced to rubble. But friends of Israel should care about this. The level of dehumanisation and aggression in Israeli discourse is unprecedented. Israeli democracy has been deeply corroded. It is troubling because any society that ceases to care about its own democracy and its own moral centre is hardly likely to care about anyone else.
Democracy in the US always weakens after its mendacity about its complicity in war. Every war has also produced a strategic blowback that weakens the US. Its lies about Iraq inaugurated the post-truth age and helped create a pervasive cynicism about liberal truth-seeking institutions. The war has strengthened its adversaries. Now its complicity has created a more polarised society, fueling both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. It has cracked down on academic freedom. It has had to subvert its own institutions. Antony Blinken ignored the finding of the US government’s own agencies that Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza and misled Congress. Its prestige, power and authority are at their lowest in recent memory. And the war has reduced the plausibility of a liberal international order to rubble.
India again abstained on the UN General Assembly resolution calling for a ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal. Its ostensible reason was the time-line was accelerated and it believes in “building bridges not furthering divides.” Even Japan, the US’s strongest ally, voted for the resolution. The MEA likes to project that India is this great peacemaker. With a few honourable exceptions, India’s media and think tanks increasingly just parrot the MEA’s self-congratulation. But across the Global South, it is an object of derision. India has to look out for its interests. But has there been any time in recent memory when India has traded in more banalities, photo-ops and false machismo for a domestic audience, even in the face of the most horrific human catastrophes and violations of international law?
Here are three democracies ushering the international order to ruin: Israel by its brutalisation of conflict, the United States by providing it complicity and cover, and India by its evasions that border on complicity. As the ground soaks more blood in Lebanon, Biden’s farewell speech to the 79th UN General Assembly ended with this line “And may God protect all those who seek peace.” Strange words. Were they an admission of impotence? Or a statement that God can have a day off, since there is no one seeking peace anyway, at least not in the world’s democracies.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike north of Beirut, in the village of Ras Osta, Byblos district, seen from Maaysrah, Lebanon, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein) 
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