No one seems willing to apply the Ciceronian logic of preferring bad peace to the best of wars. When all sides feel that they have a chance to prevail, the negotiating table moves away. The three wars that marked 2023 never came close to a negotiating table, despite the very high price that all sides are paying in their respective wars.
Russia showed no signs of willingness to negotiate anything that would not leave the entire Crimean Peninsula and Donest, Lugansk and the rest of the Donbas in its hands. But Ukraine, tired and destroyed, is not yet willing to obtain anything other than the entire territory occupied by the Russian army. The Israeli government is not willing to stop its war machine until it has completely destroyed Hamas and annihilated Yahya Sinwar, its commander in the Gaza Strip. While the terrorist organization is not willing to surrender and abandon that territory devastated by the Israeli response to its bloody pogrom of October 7.
There is also no desire to negotiate peace between the two sides that since April have turned Khartoum into an urban battlefield, causing civilian deaths, destruction and a wave of displaced people in their dispute for power in Sudan. Neither the army that answers to General Adel Fattah al-Burhane, head of the regime installed in Sudan in 2021, nor the mercenary Rapid Action Forces (FAR) commanded by the paramilitary chief Mohamed Dagalo, are willing to negotiate an armistice between these sides. who had acted together in the coup d’état that overthrew Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, the first civilian ruler after the long dictatorship of Omar al Bashir.
Neither those who repudiate Israel’s actions nor those who repudiate Hamas terrorism have repudiated the war that is destroying the Sudanese capital, killing thousands of civilians and causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people who are left to die of hunger, thirst and disease in inhospitable and desolate lands. Nor had they made their repudiations heard when Dagalo, with the weapons he received from General Burhan, murdered and raped the inhabitants of Darfur in the ethnic cleansing ordered by the dictator Al Bashir.
The same silences stun in so many other wars that do not produce the global rift that has generated the eternal Arab-Israeli conflict. By the way, there are plenty of reasons for global outrage over the tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip. Israel and Hamas are responsible for those deaths. Both commit war crimes. Israel because civilian deaths, although they are not the objective of its bombings, do not stop the war plan that is causing this tragedy. And Hamas because the deaths of Gazans and the destruction of their homes, schools and hospitals are, precisely, their strategic objective in this aberrant war.
The people of the Gaza Strip are the responsibility of Hamas, therefore, for it to start wars with the tragic consequences that it knows they will have for the Palestinians of that territory, is its abject crime. A deliberate crime, because the civilian deaths in Gaza are the true missiles that Hamas launches at the image of Israel in the dimension of world public opinion. Thus it is carving a stigma on the Israelis: the stigma of a destructive and murderous nation.
Hamas’s abjection does not excuse Israel. The laws of war are not subjective, therefore violating them involves committing war crimes. Israel is doing it. Although that is not what he proposes, he knows that it is what this action inexorably produces. Therefore, it cannot pretend that the stupor and indignation that the deaths and destruction in Gaza and Khan Yunis are producing do not erupt in the world.
That there is hypocrisy in the complaints of the left and right that always remain silent about the massacres committed by Arab states and by Islamist terrorism, does not invalidate the demand to stop the offensive that is devastating the Gaza Strip and killing a people trapped between two fires. . Netanyahu’s extremist government appears unaware of the grave harm it is causing to its own people. Although he achieves the goal of destroying Hamas, he magnified the stigma that that arm of the dark Iranian theocracy is writing about Israel and about Jews around the world.
If he destroys Hamas, in the event that it is possible to destroy what also has spectral life and therefore reincarnates, Netanyahu will have achieved only a tactical victory, having lost the strategic battle, the one that acts on the image of a country and of an ethnic group, in the dimension of world public opinion and on the international stage.
Vladimir Putin has no problems with the image of his regime in these two dimensions. That is why he used ridiculous arguments to justify the invasion that sparked the war in Ukraine: “denazify” that neighboring country. The second year of war found him in a better position. If the beginning of the conflict was fatal for the invading army, which was repelled in kyiv and forced to rethink objectives and strategies, the second year concludes with the success of the defensive fortification system, stopping the much-announced great offensive of the Ukrainian army to expel the Russians.
The two armies are exhausted, but the Russian forces have an overwhelming numerical superiority and the ammunition received from the North Korean regime made the difference because Ukraine sees the aid it receives from the Atlantic Alliance rapidly decline. In anticipation of Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House, Republicans have blocked in Congress an essential aid package so that the Ukrainian army can continue fighting with a chance of advancing over enemy lines. But if the New York tycoon overcomes the judicial obstacles and manages to win the election, Vladimir Putin will even have a chance to conquer more territories and significantly enlarge the map of Russia.
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