Reflections on War and Peace
Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, February 26, 2007.
Part I. George Orwell on Civilian Casualties
During World War II, various British citizens formed what was called a Bombing Restriction Committee. The Committee denounced the RAF’s “indiscriminate” bombing of German cities. One of the Committee’s pamphlets declared that “thousands of helpless and innocent people … are being subjected to agonizing forms of death and injury comparable to the worst tortures of the Middle Ages.” Although the author of the pamphlet wanted England to win the war, the pamphlet urged the government to stick to “legitimate” methods of war and abandon civilian bombing.
George Orwell, who deplored bloodshed, took a dim view of the Bombing Restriction Committee. In an article dated May 19, 1944, he said that “all talk of ‘limiting’ or ‘humanizing’ war is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords [such as] ‘killing civilians’, ‘massacre of women and children’, and ‘destruction of our cultural heritage.’”
He asks: “Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?” The present writer has raised the same question when the IDF refrains from attacking terrorists for fear of killing Arab civilians. There is no rational justification for such a policy, especially in view of the fact these civilians support and/or serve as shields for Arab terrorists who deliberately kill Jewish civilians.
But Orwell is speaking of civilians and soldiers, and he suggests that the lives of soldiers are no less sacred than the lives of civilians. Besides, does not a soldier have loved ones—a mother and father, brothers and sisters, perhaps also sons and daughters? Would they not be grief-stricken and shattered by his death? Modern warfare renders civilians and soldiers equal, since soldiers cannot fight without the supplies and services of civilians. Soldiers can’t fight without shoes. Bombing a shoe factory is bound to kill civilians.
Orwell hastens to point out, however, that “one must not kill children if it is any way avoidable.” By the way, Orwell fought and was wounded in the Spanish Civil War. He witnessed many atrocities, but nothing like Muslim suicide bombers deliberately exploding themselves in the midst of Jewish children.
Orwell was a most penetrating and objective analyst. Here is one of his remarkable observations: “A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers are usually the first to be evacuated, and some of the young men will be away in the army.” He goes on to say that “Probably a disproportionately large number of bomb victims will be middle-aged.” On the other hand, Orwell has the candor to conclude that what some call “legitimate” warfare slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population!
Now, let’s fast-forward to September 14, 1944, when Germany was launching V1 missiles on London. The government reported that an average of almost thirty missiles hit London daily. Orwell, who was then living in London, wrote that every missile made about thirty houses uninhabitable, and that up to five thousand people were rendered homeless every day. “At that rate,” he estimates, “between a quarter and half a million people will have been blitzed out of their homes in the last three months.”
What about the RAF bombing of Germany? Orwell notes that “If the figure published by the Germans are true, we [England and the U.S.] have really killed 1,200,000 civilians in our raids …” He insists, however, that “the outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?” It was obvious to Orwell that modern warfare, when entire nations are involved, and not merely an aristocratic military class, magnifies the inevitable barbarism of armed conflict. But he objected to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an instrument while squealing about civilian casualties.
Part II: On War and Peace Treaties
I don’t know if Orwell was aware of the monumental study of war by Pitrim Sorokin, chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University in 1941. Sorokin investigated all the known wars of Greece and Rome, as well as those of the Western Europe from the year 500 before the common era to 1925. This involved examination of some 967 important wars from the standpoint of duration, size of armies, and casualties.
967 wars in 2,425 years, which means that the Western world has experienced, on an average, one war every two-and-a-half years! It follows that war is the norm of international relations, and that what is called peace is little more than a preparation for war. But this also means that treaties of peace are worthless.
This is the conclusion of Lawrence Beilenson’s book The Treaty Trap. After studying every peace treaty going back to early Roman times, Beilenson concludes that treatises are made to be broken. He shows that treaties for guaranteeing the territorial integrity of a nation are useless to the guaranteed nation, and worse than useless insofar as they engender a false sense of security. Such treaties can only benefit nations governed by rulers intending to violate them whenever expedient.
There are crucial lessons to be drawn from these facts, especially for democracies confronted by Arab or Muslim autocracies.
First, there is no such thing as a “peace process,” except in the minds of fools or in the self-serving deceits of scoundrels. Even Daniel Pipes has admitted that the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979—which he supported—has been a failure, if only because Egypt has been a major arms supplier of the Gaza terrorists.
Second, the only rational way democracies maintain peace with Arab or Muslim regimes is to be prepared for war; and in this age of weapons of mass destruction, Israel must be capable of preemptive war.
Third, only when Muslim regimes renounce the ethos of jihad will they be sincerely amenable to peace. 1,400 years of Islamic history confirm this conclusion, which hardly anyone dares to pronounce.
Consider a February 15, 2007 paper published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Its title is “The Illusion of ‘Peace in Exchange for Territories.” Its author, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, served for twenty-five years in IDF Military Intelligence. His paper concludes that “The Arab demand for a return of all Palestinian refugees to pre-1967 Israel remains the core of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and this demand disguises Arab intentions to destroy Israel.”
As pointed out by others, “All Palestinian symbols and illustrations depict Palestine as the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. These illustrations do not show the Palestinian state as Gaza and the West Bank.”
Kedar’s paper also shows that relations between Israel and its neighbors, including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, are not dominated by the issue of disputed territory, but by the alleged Arab “right of return.”
But since the “right of return” is merely a façade for the Arab intention to destroy Israel, a rational observer must conclude that only when Muslims cease to be Muslims will they be sincerely amenable to peace.
Assuming that Israel’s political elites are rational, I must infer that all their talk about peace has nothing to do with peace but with politics; and as anyone can learn from Machiavelli, the first principle of politics is egoism, which drives politicians to obtain or retain power.
It could be argued, however, that Western politics, like Islam, is fundamentally irrational. Is this not a reasonable conclusion seeing that the West has experienced almost 1,000 wars in 2,500 years?
