Gaza, Ukraine wars have context

America, world ignore history at their peril

The United States is heavily invested in two major wars. Either one could spiral out of control and turn nuclear. As United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres puts it, these conflicts “did not happen in a vacuum.” The Gaza war was sparked by the unforgivable Oct. 7 Hamas attack on civilians, but it had a historical context that is still largely ignored.

After that attack, a few reporters looked at its context. One article, headlined “Israeli settlers terrorize West Bank Palestinians,” appeared in these pages on Nov. 13.

Palestine is separated into the West Bank and Gaza, run by different governments and separated by 30 miles. One problem for the 3 million West Bank Palestinians is that they co-exist with 500,000 Jewish settlers, 144 settlements and 100 illegal Israeli “outposts.”

The article portrays Israelis terrorizing Palestinians the way the Ku Klux Klan once terrorized American Blacks. Masked men, intent on driving Palestinians out, raid Palestinian villages, capturing, beating and killing civilians. This terrorism increased after Oct. 7. The U.N. recorded 222 such settler attacks during one month. According to the U.N., half of all settler attacks are accompanied by Israeli troops. Israel’s government has also helped make Palestinians’ lives wretched by building roads and security areas all over the West Bank and preventing Palestinians from entering them.

As one Palestinian summed it up, “These settlers would slaughter us and no one would care.” He began crying. “There are no words to describe the misery of my life.”

Such misery has persisted for decades. It was bound to explode. On Oct. 7, it did. This does not excuse Hamas’ unhinged violence, but there is also no excuse for Israel’s persecution of Palestinians and no excuse for Western indifference to this persecution.

Suppose Israel had not allowed Jewish settlers to occupy the West Bank or that Israel had given Palestinians real assistance in building a nation. Would Hamas then have been less virulent? Would they have launched their attack on Israel? We can never know history’s “what ifs,” but this certainly would have increased the probability of peace.

There were similar preludes to war in Ukraine. As I have reported previously, the context of that war begins with NATO’s expansion into East Europe. Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been apprehensive about being surrounded by NATO, and these concerns erupted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Recently, an authoritative report by three German diplomats was published under the descriptive title “How the chance was lost for a peace settlement of the Ukraine War and the West wanted to continue the war instead.”

The report’s lead author is a former U.N. Assistant secretary-general who worked for 34 years with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and on several U.N. peace missions in countries at war. One co-author is a retired German general who served as chief of staff for the German Armed Forces during 2002-05. These authors were privy to the Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiations one month after the Russian invasion, presided over by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

The report states that Ukraine and Russia made real efforts to achieve peace. Surprisingly, Ukraine and Russia agreed at the outset of the negotiations that the planned NATO expansion into Ukraine was the reason for the war, and that peace negotiations would focus on Ukraine’s neutrality and renunciation of NATO membership in return for Ukraine retaining its territorial integrity except for Crimea.

The report states “There is little doubt that these peace negotiations failed due to resistance from NATO, the USA and the UK. The reasons are that such a peace agreement would have been tantamount to a defeat for NATO and an end to NATO’s eastward expansion.”

The report documents United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s arrival in Kyiv in April 2022, where he told Volodymyr Zelensky that the West was not ready to end the war. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin then visited Kyiv and stated that the U.S. wanted to use this opportunity to permanently weaken Russia in the wake of the Ukraine War.

Thus, these promising negotiations failed, leading to the continuation of the war that is shattering Ukraine and traumatizing its people. Ukraine’s negotiating position is far worse today than it was in March 2022. Ukraine has lost much of its territory and is headed for defeat.

Ukraine is another failure of America’s militaristic foreign policy, similar to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The context for this failure was NATO expansion and America’s ambition to weaken the regime in Moscow.