October
22, 2025
The Right of War
It is
conceived for a, let’s say, regular war fought by organized armies and above all
presupposes reciprocity: you do not destroy my hospitals, and I do not destroy
yours. In fact, it was respected in the Arab-Israeli wars of ’56, ’67, and ’73,
but not in the subsequent clashes. It was also not respected in the civil wars
in Lebanon, against the ISIS caliphate, in Syria, and so on.
It was not respected in the Second World War: the Germans tried to make England
surrender by targeting civilians in London, destroyed everything in Russia, and
during the siege of Leningrad perhaps half a million civilians died. Later, the
Allies razed Germany and Japan to the ground—recall the firebombing of Dresden,
the bombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombs.