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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an FT contributing editor and writes the Chartbook newsletter
The ideal war of international law — if one can speak of such a thing — is fought between states. But what is state? Hamas is not a state, yet most people describe what is happening in Gaza as a war.
Actual wars are given their violent energy by forces that explode the bounds of statehood — nationalism, religion, ethnic or racial hatred and politics. At the same time, war’s boundaries have been extended and blurred by the evolving technologies of death — from the musket, to the flying fortress and the suicide vest.
The radicalism of modern war arises from the fact that it mixes all these ingredients. Containing and minimising religious war was supposedly the great achievement of modernity. But then came radical Islam.
Many tend to think of national wars as good wars, as in Britain’s saccharine commemoration of the second world war. But “good” national wars are often indiscriminate and ultra-violent. In the second world war, a huge part of the British military effort went into strategic bombing, enabling the RAF to achieve the first successful destruction of a city from the air, in Hamburg in July 1943.
The struggle in the Middle East is no exception to the rule of mixed warfare. Gaza is a national, ethnic and religious conflict. It is also, above all outside the immediate theatre, a political struggle. Israel’s supporters celebrate its democracy, whereas partisans for the Palestinian cause see it as a fight for national liberation.
It is not just the horror of the killing that makes dialogue about Gaza so difficult. It is the fact, as the sociologist Eva Illouz insists, that there is not one context but several disjoint contexts — the Holocaust and the Nakba, a brutal pogrom and indiscriminate bombing — so the act of contextualising, including the invocation of laws of conventional war, is inescapably political and emotionally charged.
It does not get easier when we think about what comes next.
How do modern conflicts end? The American-supervised western European settlement after 1945, of which Israel’s foundation is an extension, shows how elaborate such an order of peace must be and the painful and contradictory trade-offs even a good peace entails.
The postwar settlement was anchored in universal principles, embodied in the UN and written, for instance, into the constitution of the new Germany.
It was a political settlement, reached in a stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union — and through protracted negotiations between European states, but also between the Bonn Republic, Israel and the World Jewish Congress.
It was based not just on values and politics, but on the crushing Allied victory that erased the Third Reich and then rebuilt two German sovereignties. This came after the Potsdam conference, at which the Allies approved the forced removal of the German population of eastern Europe — 12mn people, the biggest ethnic rearrangement in European history.
The eventual absorption and pacification of Germany’s “expellees” was one of the greatest political accomplishments of West German democracy, an act of political self-disciplining eased by the economic miracle. When Germans talk of coming to terms with the past, they also mean the border with Poland.
This ambiguous and complex edifice is the ideal that Shimon Peres held up in the 1990s when conjuring the promise of a new Middle East — a political settlement enabling an acceptance of deep wounds, healed by economic growth.
In our nightmarish reality we are haunted by something infinitely worse: the fear of Carthage — a defeat, massacre and dispersal so comprehensive that it erases the defeated even from memory. This is what dawned on Israel in the horrifying hours of Hamas’s incursion. This is what the population of Gaza must fear under the relentless rain of bombs. The fear of an absolute end.
With a clear mind we all know that these are the realities. These are the memories. These are the fears. So the question now is how and in what form politics can moderate the asymmetric play of violence.
Force can create facts on the ground. Economics can help. But neither by themselves anchors peace. For that we need politics in all its forms, and in all its venues, from the conference table to the campus and the street. And that means not silencing but acknowledging the incommensurable and painful histories of the conflict.
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