Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason

War as a Way of Being: Lebanon 2006

On 12 July 2006 the Israel Defense Force (IDF) began a month-long air and ground war in Lebanon. After the bombing and firing finally ceased, 1191 Lebanese civilians and 159 Israelis were dead, and 1.5 million people had been driven from their homes.¹ It cost Israel $1.6 billion and, in Lebanon, destroyed at least $4 billion in homes and infrastructure such as roads, bridges, power plants and airfields.² Oil spills caused by the Israeli bombing of the Jiyeh power station and forest fires caused by Hezbollah rockets also created grave environmental damage that will take decades to repair.³ It was the fifth major Israeli incursion into Lebanon since 1978, and one well-placed Washington analyst grimly predicted that there will be many more.⁴

Much of the debate around the war focused on competing claims about its legitimacy and prosecution — Hezbollah struck first, Israel acted disproportionately etc. — as if these were to be taken as definitive horizons for thought about the conflict and its underlying causes. However, even as such debate has importance, it remains hostage to the event and to its most superficial level of description. It leaves the underlying knowledge and bureaucratic systems that drive and shape actions and choices, especially those which relate to the use of strategic violence, unexamined. In contrast, in this essay I wish to speculate on two powerful structures of state and strategic reason that lie beneath such claims, hidden and uncritiqued; structures that drive violence as a social technology and way of being, and for which events are so much occasion and justification, mere surface effects, like the debris left after a storm.

These structures — which I term ‘existential’ and ‘rationalist’ forms of state reason — are easily discernible beneath the surface of the recent war. The first is visible in justifications mobilised by the government of Israel and its western supporters, justifications that invoke the most basic fears about Israel’s security and existence as a state. The then IDF Chief of Staff, Air Force General Dan Halutz, told his troops that they were ‘defending the integrity of their country’; they were ‘fighting an extremist Islamic terrorist organisation that denies our right to exist’.⁵ And after the bombing of an apartment building in southern Lebanese town of Qana, which killed at least 28 civilians, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that:

Citizens of Lebanon, we are sorry for the pain caused to you, and the fact that you had to pick up and flee your homes, and also the casualties caused among innocents...But we will not apologise to those who put a question mark on the right of Israel to exist.⁶

The Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a supporter of Israel and close strategic and ideological ally of George W. Bush, mobilised a similar explanation in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in July. He was asked whether, ‘in the face of up to 700,000 refugees and billions of dollars in infrastructure destroyed, and a government that is fragile at best, in terms of the sheer pragmatics, don’t you question the ruthless extent of Israel’s response?’, only to respond:

Once you are attacked...and if that attack is in the context of a 50-year rejection of your right to exist, which is the situation in relation to Iran — and bear in mind the link between Iran and Hezbollah; bear in mind the exhortations from the Iranian President that Israel should be destroyed and wiped off the map — you can understand the tenacity with which the Israelis have responded.⁷

He was echoed by a former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who sought to refute arguments that the real source of the conflict lay with Israel’s colonial policies in Gaza and the West Bank. His view was that ‘the Palestinian issue cannot be resolved because a significant part of the Arab and Muslim world still do not accept Israel’s right to exist...Until this changes, Israel will remain as it has for 60 years: under...