16 December 2025
Modern Wars

World War II was a conflict between armies deployed on the battlefield, yet the bombings of civilians caused far worse massacres than those in Palestine. Consider, for example, that in a single bombing raid on Tokyo, a few days before the atomic bombs, 75,000 civilians were killed — usually burned alive, as in Dresden — more than the number of Palestinians killed in two years of war.
And yet it was an open war between armies, not an asymmetric war in which one side is made up of soldiers (guerrillas) who hide among the crowds. And still, no one ever spoke of genocide.
But that’s only one example: in all modern wars in the Middle East there is no distinction between civilians and soldiers. Think of the hundreds of thousands of victims in the (unknown) war between the Houthis and the Saudi Arabs, those in Syria, and even more in the Caliphate, and so on.
Let’s also think of the roughly two million deaths in Vietnam, and those in Ethiopia, Congo, Sudan, and so on.
The fact is that war is not a sports competition in which whoever breaks the rules loses, but something horrible in which the winner is the one who uses the means necessary to win, however horrible they may be.