The 1949 Geneva Convention defined war crimes by setting out specific rules on how wars may not be waged under any circumstances. Protecting civilians is the top priority. This agreement was a great attempt to secure fundamental human rights. However, the effort was doomed to failure from the outset.
Until about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, princes were constantly at war with each other, and not only in Europe. This was because wars served to expand their power. They defeated opposing troops in order to expand their territory and enhance their food base. It was not in the interest of these lords by the grace of God to destroy the food base itself, that is, the eighty to ninety-five percent of the food-producing peasantry. To be sure, peasants often suffered terribly under enemy occupation, and they were regularly squeezed dry by their own masters (see Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages), but none of the warlords aimed to destroy them. In this way, a majority of the civilian population was relatively protected.
But in addition to the wars of the princes, which were fought between knights or mercenaries and used to be comparatively harmless in terms of the number of victims, there always existed, and still exist, the wars of faith. The Christian crusaders in Palestine waded knee-deep in blood because Muslims were pagans and thus damned by God to hell anyway. A little later, Muslims invaded India and wreaked even more havoc there than the Christian crusaders. “The Muslim conquest of India,” says the great US-American historian Will Durant, “is probably the bloodiest event in world history. It is a discouraging story because it conveys the obvious insight that civilization is always at risk.” It is said that Sultan Ahmad Shah celebrated for three days every time the number of Hindus slaughtered in one day exceeded twenty thousand.
The war against Ukraine was initially a classic example of princely war. A Russian dictator named Vladimir Putin found himself in agreement withZbigniew Brzeziński, the author of “The Grand Chess Game”, that without Ukraine, Russia would no longer be an empire. For this reason the man in the Kremlin decided that this country had to come back under Russian rule. This did not appear to be difficult either, since Putin had originally referred to the Ukrainians as “Russian brothers”, whose God-given historical destiny implied their obedient submission to Russian leadership. But it came as a big surprise to Russia and the rest of the world that from the outset Ukraine put up fierce resistance to this annexation. This unexpected reaction was to produce a change of heart in the Russian dictator. The war of princes turned into a war of faith – outwardly recognizable by the fact that the Ukrainian brothers and sisters now became neo-fascist outcasts, against whom a war of extermination could be waged in good conscience.
The war that Iran and its henchmen, Hamas and Hezbollah, are waging against Israel is a war of faith too. Iran is not threatened by Israel, nor does it share a border with that country. The usual reasons for a war are simply absent. However, the Shiite mullah regime is a pariah within a big majority of Sunni countries. By fomenting hatred of Israel and providing its vassals with weapons to destroy it, the Iranian leaders gained the recognition of the Muslim world. This advantage seemed suddenly to be lost when Israel established diplomatic relations with most of its Muslim neighbors creating a normal relationship. Iran could not allow this to happen. In order to drive once again a wedge between Israel and the Islamic world, it incited Hamas to carry out its bloody attack on October 7 – an orgy of wanton brutality. Despite all the harshness against Muslims in the West Bank and the attacks by settlers, secular Israel has never waged a religious war against its Muslim neighbors, except for a minority of right-wing fanatics and Orthodox Jews.
Why is the country of Israel nevertheless taking the toughest possible line against its attackers? Why have more than ten thousand civilians in Gaza already had to die?
Israel’s war against its enemies falls into a special category. It is neither a war of faith nor a war of princes, but a war in which a miniature state is simply fighting for its survival. The Geneva Convention has declared the bombing of hospitals, schools and other civilian facilities to be a war crime. Since Israel has destroyed such targets on a large scale, there are growing calls to prosecute Israel for constantly committing such crimes. The idealistic authors of the convention did not foresee that the bombing of civilian facilities could become an imperative for survival.
Violating the convention becomes unavoidable when the enemy uses civilian facilities to hide rocket bases or command centers within them. If a country deliberately exposes its own population as a human shield and hostage, who is to blame when a hospital is bombed – the calculating hostage-maker or the enemy that destroys the military base but also the population thus misused? No matter how you twist the provisions of the convention, the abuse of its own civilian population by Hamas and Hezbollah is no less inhumane than the annihilation of innocent women and children by Israeli forces. It is already foreseeable that the abuse of civilians as living shields for military installations will become the norm in future wars.
Wars between princes have become rare in our time. It is only the new Russian Tsar, who still behaves as princes used to do when he tries to force former Soviet vassal countries, now independent states, back under the Russian yoke (because the collapse of the Soviet Union was, from his point of view, the “greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century”). In democratic countries, power no longer lies with a tsar or ruler by the grace of God, but with the elected representatives of the people. The nationalism that emerged with the industrial revolution had to turn the former war of princes into a war of nations, which then took on the typical coloration of wars of faith. Since then, enemy nations are branded as ideological foes: they are considered inferior races, fascists, communists, Jews or some other kind of subhumans.
Why do wars happen at all? Wouldn’t it be possible to avoid them altogether? Decent German peace researchers use to have a firm opinion on this matter. Humans must remain in communication with each other, they insist, then wars will be averted. Interestingly, this message comes from Peking as well. All problems can be solved through negotiations – this is a constant Chinese mantra. Unfortunately, it is a product of hypocrisy as well, because at the same time, Beijing insists on red lines that on principle can and will never be subject to negotiations. There can be no talks about Tibet, about Xin Jiang, about Taiwan and about Beijing’s complete sovereignty in the South China Sea. (1) It seems, brave German peace researchers have left out one point that happens to be the most important of all, namely that the beginning of a war regularly consists of categorically rejecting all talk and all negotiation.
Wars of faith are not ended by talks but by decisive victories or the total exhaustion of the opponent. For the time being, Putin is not interested in talks that may require any concessions from his side. Instead, he is very adept at using the threat of nuclear war to scare the West. Just as Hitler saw only weakness in the attempts of the Allies to appease him and became even more aggressive, so Putin too takes advantage of his opponents‘ fear. For three quarters of a century, the sword of Damocles, the threat of nuclear holocaust, has been hanging over the globe. It will certainly not be averted by appeasement, but only by all parties reminding each other of what will happen to them if they actually use this terrible achievement of our relentless “progress”. Fortunately, the Russian military know about this just as well as their American counterpart. The war against Ukraine will end neither through threat nor appeasement nor through the unequivocal victory of either side but most likely because of utter exhaustion. For the sake of that brave country and its president I hope that Western aid will eventually lead to Russia’s collapse and to a palace revolution against Vladimir Putin. However, this is by no means certain. In Europe, Russia’s threats are having a clear impact, and we know that potential President Donald Trump has a pronounced weakness for dictators like Kim Jong-un and the Russian tsar as he would so much like to be one himself.
And how will Israel’s war for survival end? Wouldn’t it have been avoidable if Israel had opted for a two-state solution in time? And wouldn’t Netanyahu have been able to free the hostages and avoid the war spreading to Lebanon, perhaps even to Iran, if he had done what a significant part of the Israeli population has long been calling on him, namely make a truce with Hamas? Certainly. Peace would then be secured for a year or two. But this would have been a transitory peace at best, because, as I said before, the bloody mullah regime in Iran derives much of its political prestige in the Islamic world from its enmity towards Israel. The regime would have misused a premature peace to quietly rearm Hamas and Hezbollah. The State of Israel would have gained nor more than a breathing space, but meanwhile the danger to its survival would have grown exponentially as Iran’s holy warriors are quite near the point where they will have their own weapons of nuclear mass destruction.
Netanyahu’s unyielding tenacity certainly has something to do with his political survival, but I do understand that this man seeks at all costs to prevent the further strengthening of Iran and its fanatical followers. If the Israeli prime minister succeeds in destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities – which, however, can only be done with special bunker busters from the US – then Israel may hope for peace and quiet, at least for the next ten to fifteen years.
Unfortunately, wars are never ended by better insight or the well-intentioned advice of German peace researchers, but as a rule only by a clear victory or mutual exhaustion (see Jörn Leonhard: Über Kriege und wie man sie beendet – On Wars and How to End Them). Hamas’s resistance has now been virtually eliminated, Hezbollah has been decapitated several times and is already largely incapable of fighting. The question remains whether Netanyahu will succeed in weakening Iran, the country that is actually behind the war, to the point of surrender. Iran’s two rocket attacks have given him the necessary justification to do so.
But will Israel then win peace? Unfortunately, that is by no means certain. Its enemies calculated correctly when they sacrificed their own people in order to then direct outrage at Israel. Israel has made itself hated all over the world. Anti-Semitism is flaring up everywhere. Jews are emigrating from the United States and also from Europe to the State of Israel, where they still feel safer despite all that rocket fire. How can Israel counter this hatred?
To do so, it would have to turn the military victory against its enemies into a political one. The country would have to apply the same medicine as the USA did after the Second World War when dealing with defeated Germany. The Americans treated their former enemies with utmost generosity, thus quickly rebuilding trust. Only in this way, seems a lasting peace seems possible at all. Precisely because tiny Israel has so far been so superior to its enemies, nationalist triumphalism or even further expansion would definitely poison relations with neighboring countries – including Sunnis.
And of course one thing must not be forgotten either. Not only the Jews, but also the Palestinians are threatened in their survival. The Gaza Strip is a kind of open-air prison, the West Bank has not been a place where the local population can feel at home since the UN decided to establish the state of Israel in 1947. However, we Germans should keep our mouths shut, because it was the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews, which – in the eyes of the Jews and the world public – forced the founding of the state of Israel. One terrible crime thus sets in motion an endless chain of measures, which in turn result in great wrongs.
1. See Thomas Gomart: L’accélération de l’histoire. “At the end of August 2023, the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources published the ‘National Map of China’, which violated the borders of India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan and even Russia, and triggered fierce protests. On this document, Taiwan is an integral part of the PRC.”