Is It Possible to Negotiate a Gentler Genocide?

War, at least between states, should be an easy problem to solve. All you have to do is to not do it. Don't strike at other countries for any reason. Don't strike back if for any reason they strike you. If they invade, as Russia did in Ukraine in 2020, then you may have a reasonable case for self-defense, but such events should be rare and avoidable. Ukraine had six years before Russia invaded to try to resolve its internal conflict, and had failed to do so.

I'm going to cover a lot of ground rather quickly here, so I'm going to make some strong assertions, without fully defending them, and offer some sweeping proposals, without fully detailing them. My aim here is to offer a practical end to Israel's wars, which at present feature the US not just as facilitator but as participant. This is very important not just to alleviate the immense suffering caused by those wars, and to prevent further escalation, but because I believe that the ideas that incite and perpetuate these wars are deeply corrosive to the humanity of those who wage them, and to the societies they come from. I believe that the modern world only works through cooperation, which depends on a sense of security, trust, and justice. For this, we must end war, and significantly inhibit the primal instincts which lead to war.

The key word here is "justice," which I won't try to define beyond the sense that one will be treated fairly by the state and society. Well, let's also stipulate that revenge is a poor substitute for justice, and often a generator of injustice. Codes of vengeance are ancient, and may have contributed to the development of modern states, which seek to monopolize violence and to codify and limit its use through law. This often works well enough. In America, which has a far-from-perfect system of justice, I generally feel safe to speak my mind, to travel, and to engage in commerce, with little fear from police or others. Elsewhere, even for other people in America, results may disappoint. Still, it seems better to try to make one's state more virtuous than to dispense with order and make everyone fend for themselves (the libertarian model).

But the relative success of national governments at securing some approximation of justice led many people to think that we need some kind of world government. After the horrors of the 1914-1945 world wars, and taking into account the increasingly globalized economy, the US and others took the first tentative steps by founding the UN and related cooperative institutions, including courts, and codifying laws, but they stopped short of providing any form of enforcement. Few, if any, nations were willing to sacrifice their sovereignty, and there was, and still is, vast disagreements on what government should do.

Nor is force an option: the world is, as Jonathan Schell put it, "unconquerable." History is littered with failed empires, from the Romans to the Mongols to the recently defeated Axis powers, with Britain and France soon to follow. Even states with universalist credos, like the Soviet Union and the United States, proved unable to manage their own hubris, especially when they imagined themselves heading up some kind of "new world order." I believe that the flaw here is the idea that power alone can compel conformity. I'm not saying it cannot work for a while, but it takes a toll, growing resentment, and eventually turning its masters into monsters.

Since world government is an impossible dream, is there any way to work with the anarchy of independent states? I'd suggest the following principles:

1. No state, or organization under a state, can intervene in any other state, except as explicitly permitted by the latter state. War is the most egregious offense here, but any untoward behavior can be treated as a violation of non-intervention.

2. All states, and through them all people, can join the United Nations, which will provide a forum for setting standards and conventions. While these will have some moral force, no individual nation is obligated to support them, nor can be penalized for failing to do so.

3. The United Nations will create cooperative organizations as needed, which all will be able to join, under equal terms. Alternatively, states may form their own ad hoc cooperative organizations, on whatever terms they so decide.

4. There will be a system of courts for adjudicating disputes between nations. The courts will endeavor to find and weigh facts, but will not have any power to enforce its decisions. While membership in the courts is voluntary, their purview may extend beyond member states. As much as possible, disputes should be translated into monetary costs, as those are intrinsically easier to resolve.

5. Individual states, or groups thereof, will be able to restrict interaction with states they disapprove of. They may implement sanctions or other financial restrictions, possibly based on court findings. The implementation is external to the targeted state, so does not infringe on its rights against intervention. Conversely, prohibiting states from imposing sanctions would be an intervention against states' rights. The best we can do here is to recommend standard practices that are unlikely to escalate, and that can be unwound if the reasons for sanctions were remedied.

In general, nations should be encouraged to cooperate for common aims, but free to dissent and go their own way. This is similar to the actual United Nations, but the slightly different focus would require numerous reforms, much more than I can deal with here. Some of them will be apparent when we look at the specific case of Israel.

So, What About Israel?

Israel is a unique case, one which the UN has grappled with almost since its inception, and has repeatedly failed to deliver anything even remotely resembling peace with justice. This is partly due to the unique historical context in which Israel was founded, and partly due to the design flaws in the UN (including the US veto power), but mostly due to the decision of Israeli political leaders, starting with David Ben-Gurion in 1947 (or earlier), to establish a Jewish demographic majority that would permanently subjugate any/all Palestinians who were not killed or driven into exile. The history here is complex and interesting, with both Arabs and Israelis able to make credible cases for extreme and exclusionary views.

But the Israelis have been in a dominant power position ever since they declared independence in 1948, while ignoring the UN-approved partition borders, aggressively expanding their territory, driving over 700,000 Palestinians away from their homes, refusing to negotiate peace treaties with their neighbors (until 1979, when prodded by the US they cut a separate deal with Egypt), and ultimately, in 1967, launching another war to seize even more land — and, as it turned out, more unwanted Palestinian subjects, who have stubbornly clung to their homes, despite a legal and military regime designed to deny them virtually all rights.

Israel's 1979 treaty with Egypt removed the last serious foreign threat, but rather than building on that to establish a respectful rapport with the Palestinians, Israel launched a civil war in Lebanon, and have managed to keep a string of foreign "fronts" active, which led to their promotion of existential threats from Iraq and then Iran — both of which served primarily to consolidate American military support, and eventually to entangle American presidents in long and fruitless wars. One result is that Israel is by far the most completely militarized nation in the world. Even more disturbing is how Israel's military thinking, where "deterrence" is a mere mask for domination, has rubbed off on America. Trump took this quite literally in renaming his "Department of War" and turning them loose in unprovoked aggression against Venezuela and Iran.

But Israel's foreign wars have never been more than a side show, a way of distracting attention from what they regard as their real existential threat: the continued (and unhappy) existence of millions of Palestinians, both within their borders, and the still-registered descendants of the refugees of 1947-49.

How to Stop Missing Opportunities

A Palestinian Virtual State

A Right to Exile

War Insurance

A Sanctions Regime

An Exit From Sanctions

The following is stuff I wrote but moved off to the side:

Some of the proposals may also help end other conflicts, and I may circle back around to Ukraine at the end. But Israel is unique in several ways. While all those ways will factor into the proposals, the key one is that Israel's wars against other nations (Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen) are side shows that distract from their main focus, which is an internal war against the Palestinians who were native to the land they seized mostly in 1948 and 1967.

Wars between states can be prevented by each country maintaining sovereignty within their own borders, and agreeing not to intervene in the affairs of other states beyond their borders. But there are also conflicts within nations: between the state and its people, or between rival factions in more complex power structures. Such conflicts are often exacerbated when foreign powers intervene and seek influence, something which we should lobby against.

But we need to understand that the principle of non-intervention, which is essential to ending the wars that have plagued us over the last century, also prevents us from intervening in civil wars, no matter how devastating they may turn. The 1948 Genocide Convention attempted to establish some limits, beyond which intervention could be directed by the UN Security Council. This has never been tried, and there is no reason to think that Israel could be targeted: it has one of the world's largest and most deadly militaries, and it would certainly receive diplomatic cover (including a UNSC veto) from the United States. The US has not only defended Israel in the UN. It has also used its own arbitrary sanctions power to silence critics of Israel, including UN employees.

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If we've learned anything from the quarter-century since 2001, it is that power cannot dictate terms that people regard as unjust, and that the arrogant insistence on on pursuing such ambitions hurts everyone involved, perpetrators as well as victims. One corrollary of this is that the fear of terror called "deterrence" is counterproductive, as likely to provoke war as to prevent it.

Start by writing about WWII and its aftermath. 50 million deaths. The founding of the UN, its fractures, and the problems of international government. Also the end of colonialism, and the need of capitalism to maintain hegemony in the former colonies.

This leads to the idea of reforming the UN based on the principles of national sovereignty and non-intervention. This leads to the paradox that we need to prohibit war, but cannot enforce peace. We should clarify that the UN is a collection of states, not of nations, let alone of peoples.

We might digress a bit into the nature of war, making a distinction between wars between states, and equivalent or contributory actions inside a state. The UN seeks to prohibit war between states, but cannot prevent war within a state without violating the sovereignty of that state. Nonetheless, we can codify behavior within a state that should be universally disapproved of.

While we cannot intervene to stop a state from abusing its subjects, we can provide a means for other nations to disapprove and try to nudge the state toward better behavior. The mechanism for this is sanctions.

Let's talk about genocide

Genocide was a word that was invented in {when?}, to define a crime so heinous that we might banish it forever. It was required to include one historical case (the systematic killing of Jews by Nazi Germany), but was generalized to apply to any case that focused violence against an arbitrary group of people (a genus or type).

Genocide is a specific case of the more general concepts: crimes of war, and crimes against humanity.

We might introduce the term "pre-genocide" to describe conditions that could lead to genocide: definition of groups that are subject to discriminatory treatment, violence-prone policing, and repressive state power. There is no minimum threshold of killing to qualify as genocide.

What Does Israel Want?