Israel & the violation of states' sovereignty

Israel's relentless pounding of Beirut raises the critical question of how powerful states in our times as also earlier have with impunity violated the sovereignty of weaker nations. The tragedy at this point is that Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist-dominated government in Tel Aviv are not being forcefully persuaded by the world's influential powers into calling a halt to their aggressive acts. The genocide in Gaza goes on; influential leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah have systematically been targeted and killed by Israeli forces; not even senior Iranian military figures have been spared.

And now it is Lebanon whose territorial integrity and sovereignty are under assault by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Israel's friends in the West have done little to convince Tel Aviv that its actions have now reached a point where a wider conflagration could be staring the world in the face. Israel now plans an assault on Iran in light of the latter's missile attack on the former earlier this month. Israel goes on bombing busy neighbourhoods in Beirut in search of Hezbollah, who along with Hamas have vowed to carry on with their military campaign against the Netanyahu government. The recent drone attack on Netanyahu's home is a reflection of how conditions are spiralling out of control of all the elements involved in the current crisis.

The brazenness of Israeli actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are once again a reminder of how nations have historically suffered through the aggressive designs of states that have had no qualms in violating the independence of other states. It is such actions which have belied the pious calls for peace to descend on the world. In real terms, peace has never been part of the global landscape for as long as one can remember. In our times, the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet forces in December 1979 was an early indication of the chaos that would descend on Kabul and keep it in its grip for decades. The Soviets were compelled to beat a retreat from Afghanistan in Gorbachev times, but that was no hint that the country, by then a state ravaged by war and internecine tribal conflict, would get back to being a normal state.

The entry of the United States (US), Britain and other western powers into Afghanistan in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York pushed Kabul into a new phase of instability and chaos that would last twenty years before President Biden announced a precipitate departure from the country in August 2021. Afghanistan simply fell like a ripe fruit back into the hands of the Taliban. The ramifications are today only too obvious: the Soviet and US-led invasions of Afghanistan have left the country a wasteland over which medieval barbarism rules in the shape of the Taliban. Kabul's sovereignty was crushed in those two invasions. And when one observes Iraq, whose sovereignty was brutally undercut by the US and Britain in 2003 on the basis of a lie about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction, it is a broken country riven by sectarian conflict which has not been able to reclaim its self-esteem.

In the course of the Second World War (WW2), Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler together engineered the destruction of the independent state of Poland, an act which reflected the impunity with which leaders of dominant states went into ruining lives in countries they intended to claim for themselves or destroy. Add to that the Nazi invasions of France and other countries in Europe, militarism which would eventually leave a world in ruins. When nations violate the sovereignty of other nations, it is the floodgates to larger disasters that are thrown open. One could speak here of the brutality with which the Soviet Union, in 1956, crushed Imre Nagy's rebellion in Hungary.

Budapest clearly wanted out of the communist system imposed on eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, but Stalin's successors would have none of it. The Soviet action only added to a deepening of the Cold War. In conditions similar to 1956, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact powers sent in tanks and armoured vehicles into Prague to demolish Alexander Dubcek's Prague Spring in 1968. Gustav Husak, installed in office by Leonid Brezhnev, would be condemned to presiding over a Soviet vassal state until a movement more successful than Dubcek's, that led by Vaclav Havel, would send communism packing in Czechoslovakia.

There have been invasions that have aroused ridicule among observers of global politics around the world. Ronald Reagan's invasion of Granada, in alliance with six Caribbean countries, in 1983 did little to enhance respect for Washington, which had already paid a price for its policy in Vietnam and its invasion of Cambodia in the Nixon-Kissinger years. Any invasion of a sovereign country often leaves reputations in tatters. Henry Kissinger was never able to outlive the opprobrium associated with the Cambodia invasion in 1970.

The military in Indonesia, led by General Suharto, invaded East Timor in late 1975 and kept the country under brutal occupation till Jakarta was forced to relinquish its hold and have East Timor, today's Timor Leste, emerge once again as an independent state. The occupation of East Timor will be remembered as a dark moment in the history of the Indonesian military, which also must grapple with the record of the serious human rights violations it engaged in following the fall of President Ahmed Sukarno from power.

Turkey's invasion of Cyprus in 1974 effectively destroyed any chance of a resolution of the conflict on the island between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The island remains divided, with two administrations operating in their separate patches of territory. Closer to our times, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has caused a crisis which has affected almost the entire globe. While Moscow and Kyiv fight it out, it is the economies of nations dependent on oil and food imports and exports which take the brunt of the crisis. Vladimir Putin, for all his worries about Nato getting closer to his country's borders, clearly made a mistake when he decided to launch an assault on Ukraine. The crisis is now one where Putin cannot win and a situation where the West will not have Volodymyr Zelenskyy lose.

Israel's battering of Lebanon raises the uncomfortable question: Are invasions and bombardments of sovereign nations by aggressor-states now fast acquiring legitimacy? The next question follows: Is a rules-based international order now obsolete, with entities like the United Nations (UN) as helpless as was the League of Nations prior to 1939?

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