ISMAIL LAGARDIEN | We know the ends of the 70-Year War, but not how it will end

Writing about a day before going to press, anything written about the war in Western Asia could be obsolete and irrelevant at any minute.

War is like that. It takes on a life of itself. In this particular instance there is a blurring of the ends of this war and how it may end — if it ends in our lifetime.

That’s not an outlandish statement. What tugs on the sleeve of our sensibilities is the sense that what we are witnessing over the skies and on the streets of cities in Western Asia is the latest phase of a seven-decade war started by the Europeans.

Wars aren’t always fought on battlefields, neither are they always between “nations” and confined to territorial boundaries. There are also interstices of calm that are deceptive. We’ll come back to those.

The situation in Western Asia has a European political origin, a financial and institutional guarantee based on guilt and underwritten by military intelligence force. These are the things that make wars possible.

Almost immediately after Germany legalised Israel, so to speak, the atrocities began.

The political origin may be tied to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The financial and institutional promise was by the German government (in the Bundesgesetzblatt II of November 1953) and endorsed by the North Atlantic Community — especially Britain and the US.

The Balfour Declaration started an official process of dispossessing Palestinians, and at the end of the war in 1945 German guilt vowed total support for European settlement of Palestine. With the 1953 Bundesgesetzblatt the Germans believed they had a “compelling moral obligation” to facilitate the transportation and settlement of Europeans in Palestine and the “development” of Israel.

Germany’s reparations were specifically directed at supporting the passage of Europeans from Europe and settlement of Palestine (by Europeans) after 1945. In his memoirs (Erinnerungen 1953–55), German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was less concerned about the plight of Palestinians than he was with salving the German conscience.

A line can be drawn from the First Zionist Congress of 1897, in Basel, Switzerland, to the Balfour Declaration in London, to German decisions in Bonn, and military and intelligence insurance provided from Washington.

Almost immediately after Germany legalised Israel, so to speak, the atrocities began. Moshe Sharett, Israel’s foreign minister between 1948 and 1956, detailed in his diaries that between October and December 1953 Ariel Sharon led a raid on Palestinian villages in which 69 people were “blown up in their homes”. There have been numerous violent encounters since those fatal early days of the Israeli state.

The people of Israel aren’t bound by territory; quite the opposite is true. The Israelis have been engaging in a spatiotemporal war since 1948.

And so began a 70-year war. Sure, there have been “peace accords” or “concessions”. It’s worth remembering, though, that the Europeans fought the Hundred Years’ War intermittently across political regimes between 1337 and 1453, and included treaties, truces and periods of relative calm.

The Europeans also fought the Thirty Years’ War across pauses and periods of relative peace between 1618 and 1648. We also speak today about a Thirty Years War between 1914 and 1945, when Europeans killed tens of millions of other Europeans from Ypres in 1915 to the Soviet defeat of the Nazis in Berlin in May 1945 — never mind the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

I am not given to relying on Winston Churchill as a source of inspiration, but he too recognised the period between 1914 and 1945 as “a second Thirty Years War”, a single historical unit.

When or how the current phase of war will end is anybody’s guess. What we can say with some confidence is that the people of Iran are territorially bound and are defending themselves within those boundaries — with only retaliatory strikes abroad. The people of Israel aren’t bound by territory; quite the opposite is true. The Israelis have been engaging in a spatiotemporal war since 1948.

Borrowing from the closing passages of Anna Karenina (on pan-Slavism), it has become clearer over decades that the Israelis are fighting to establish a world epoch and the creation of Greater Israel, underwritten by Britain, Germany and the US. The ends of the war seem clear, less so is the end of the war in Western Asia. It may not become clear in our lifetime.

• 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.