There’s an important conceptual difference between war and particular wars. My interests have always been the former. This focus makes you think deeper, longer and harder about things such as why war brings out some of the finest characteristics in some humans. It is during war that things such as solidarity, camaraderie, courage and self-sacrifice come to the fore.
It also focuses attention on whether war can be eliminated, or whether war has (actually) been more prevalent in human society than peace. It makes you wonder, in the manner of the Roman god Janus, why Europeans have been at war so often and for so long in the past, and why they continue to go to war in the present, with threats of future wars.
It makes you reflect on the way Western Europeans have for at least the past 200 years spread fears of Russia, drawing — panicky, sometimes — on the Great Northern War of 1700—21. You recognise what British general Robert Wilson wrote in 1817 — that Russia’s Tsar Alexander was “inebriated by power” and, fast forward 200 years, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described Russian President Vladimir Putin as being “drunk from power”.
It brings us back to today, here and now, reflecting on the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spread fears of Iran’s impending nuclear arms for the past 30 years. Of course, I write not in defence of Russia’s war on Ukraine, nor of nuclear weapons anywhere.
For two weeks or so, before Israeli missiles rained down on Iranians on June 12, I thought, read, worked (and reworked) an essay reflecting on morality in war, with particular reference to the statement that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was “the most moral” military in the world.
An early conclusion I reached reflected on Philip Caputo’s book on the US war in Vietnam, A Rumor of War. He wrote: “It was the land that resisted us, the land, the jungle, the sun. Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there; bodies, boot leather, metal, morals. In the field, the humanity of the soldiers rubbed off them as the protection bluing rubbed off the barrels of their rifles.”
As the war between Israel and its bêtes noires spread horizontally (territorially) and vertically (intensity), I realised the challenges of writing about war during wartime — unless you’re on the front lines reporting on a particular war. And so, trying to make sense of the war in western Asia, I come back to war in the European imagination, which is almost impossible to write about in a manner that would be satisfactory to everyone.
The British historian Michael Howard wrote in War in European History that “the Origins of Europe”, an historian of the Middle Ages recently reminded us, “were hammered out on the anvil of war” and “‘war’ is too benign a term to describe the conditions of the European continent”.
The evidence, from the Trojan War in the 12th or 13th century to the wars that broke up Yugoslavia, is certainly clear. The 19th century “fathers” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl and his colleagues, Max Nordau, Chaim Weizmann, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Leon Pinsker, among others, were European.
The creation of the Israeli state, and what the IDF has been doing since 1948, may readily be tied to that distinctly European tradition referred to by Rolf Petri, professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Venice, as “civilise or make disappear” in his A Short History of Western Ideology.
What I have settled on is a reference made by the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson (not quite the genius of Eric Hobsbawm), when I consider the conduct of IDF soldiers, and attendant morality claims. So cruel were German soldiers during Europe’s war in 1914-45 that Ferguson wrote their recollections: “We were forbidden to take prisoners ... we suddenly felt gripped by something horrible which made our skins crawl ... something hideous had entered our spirits to remain and haunt us forever”.
• 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.
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