War is an inherently brutal, ugly and uncivilized activity. That’s why, over the course of centuries, the nations of the world have tried to come up with agreements and traditions that place limits on the savagery of war.
I remember stories from the First World War, how, on Christmas Eve, an informal truce would be called. French and German soldiers would sing Christmas Carols to each other from opposing trenches.
One of the most civilizing limitations that warring nations have sometimes honoured was the idea that only soldiers should fight and die in wars. Civilians, especially children, were deemed to ‘non-combatants’.
‘Honourable’ soldiers would make great efforts to avoid killing or injuring non-combatants. Though this agreed limitation on the violence of war was often ignored - think of General Sherman’s torching of Atlanta, the London blitz, the siege of Stalingrad, the carpet bombing of Dresden, or the mass slaughter that took place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki - strong and often successful efforts have been made in a good many wars over the course of history to minimize the number of civilian casualties.
Early in the the Ukraine War, ardent Russian nationalists gave grief to Vladimir Putin for not immediately destroying Ukraine’s electrical grid, in the way that NATO had destroyed the power plants in Belgrade at the start of the War in Yugoslavia.
Putin agreed that doing so would greatly help Russia achieve its military objectives by disrupting enemy transport and communications, and impeding the production of war materials. But Putin refused to do so on the grounds that it would cause too much harm to the civilian population of Ukraine.
Ukraine had shown no such scruples in its treatment of civilians. In the years between 2014 and the start of the Special Military Operation in February of 2022, Ukraine deliberately targeted civilians in the breakaway Donbass Republics, killing several thousands of civilians. This deliberate targeting of civilians has continued in the two years since. (This slaughter of civilians by Ukraine has somehow been completely invisible to Western journalists for some strange reason.)
Last year, Ukraine began targeting civilians in the Belgorod region of Russia. At that point, Russia began slowly taking out Ukraine’s power plants and transformer stations in tit-for-tat responses to Ukraine’s killing of civilians in Russia proper. But there was no concerted attempt to take down the power grid as a whole.
Then came the barbarous attack on hundreds of Russian families attending a concert at the Crocus Hall in Moscow on March 22th. The perpetrators were captured alive trying to flee to Ukraine. Turns out they were poor, stupid and desperate guns-for-hire - and the money trail led back to Ukraine.
Russia’s response was clear and immediate. If Ukraine thought all Russians were targets, that there was no such thing as non-combatants, well, two could play that game.
In the weeks since, Russia has been steadily taking out thermal, hydro power, and transformer stations all across Ukraine.
With each power plant the Russians take out, the remaining grid becomes less stable and more fragile. I suspect Russia could take down the whole electric grid tomorrow, but they prefer to take out the power stations one at a time, like removing blocks one by one from a Jenga tower, hoping that the final collapse of the grid will occur on a day when Russia hasn’t attacked at all.
The point is that a sense of honour will cause a country continue to follow for an extended period of time various traditions meant to rein in the savagery of war, even when their opponents do not play by the same rules. Eventually though, they will reach a breaking point: If you’re not going to play by the rules - neither will we.
Why this is important is that Israel has been trashing a whole series of traditions meant to reduce the harms of war: Slaughtering thousands of children, leveling whole towns, attacking schools, hospitals and refugee camps, using starvation as a weapon of war. Attacking an embassy on foreign soil. Murdering the three grandchildren of a diplomat involved in ceasefire negotiations.
If we lose those traditional limits on war, wars will grow ever more devastating.
A week after Israel attacked the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, armed Ecuadorian soldiers entered the Mexican consulate in Guayaquil and removed at gunpoint an Ecuadorian who had been granted refugee status there. If that kind of erosion of diplomatic immunity continues, it will become increasingly unsafe to be a diplomat. Diplomats are often our last line of defence against the onset of war.
Killing a diplomat’s family is an even more egregious precedent. Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu both have children and grandchildren. Anthony Blinken has two children. Israel with its actions has painted targets on the backs of all those innocents. How far do we want to descend into that kind of barbarism?
Hiring desperate people via the internet to be mass murderers is also a game that two can play. America currently has roughly ten million illegal immigrants, often poor and desperate. Sometimes with a criminal past. That’s a very big pool of potential recruits.
Americans at this point are inured to crazy Americans with high-powered weapons shooting up schools, malls, churches and outdoor concerts. I doubt Americans will be so sanguine if it is illegal immigrants pulling the trigger. If whoever paid for the hit is more careful at covering their tracks than the Ukrainians were, Americans may be left wondering which of America’s many enemies paid for the attack.
So far Hezbollah has been quite restrained in attacking only military targets in Northern Israel, with the result only eight civilians have died so far in Northern Israel. The IDF has killed many times that number of civilians in Lebanon and Syria. I figure it’s only a matter of time before Hezbollah decides that turnabout is fair play. Why target a military outpost in the middle of nowhere when there are all those apartment blocks clustered together in downtown Haifa?
That’s when the Israelis will understand, the only thing uglier than war, is a war without rules.
PS: I realized after writing this, I had posited unnecessary restrictions on America’s enemies in a world without rules. Why restrict yourself to hiring illegal immigrants to slaughter Americans on your behalf, when tens of millions of native-born Americans are in desperate financial distress, and often already own the requisite semi-automatic weapons?
Can we be absolutely sure that some shadowy force hasn’t already been recruiting Ukrainian freighter captains and United Airlines plane mechanics? In a world without rules, the line between a clear-sighted risk assessment and paranoia can get mighty thin.
In the outrage after the October 7th Hamas attacks, there were many strident assertions in both the Israeli and American press that there should be no limits placed on Israel’s war against Hamas. I think it is time to recognize that the long-established limits on what’s not okay in war were put in place for very good reasons. A world without those limits will become an increasingly unpleasant place for all of us.
PPS: The mainstream US press has worked hard to characterize US university protests against the genocide in Gaza as “anti-semitism” which somehow makes it okay to call in the National Guard to attack theses peaceful protesters. This speech from Naomi Klein - reported in the UK Guardian of all places - eloquently differentiates the morality of Judaism from the unhinged immorality of Zionism.