Historical Sociology and International Relations: The Question of Genocide

Posted: May 13, 2013 in genocide, globalization and democratisation
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A new piece just published in the journal e-International Relations

Although most International Relations scholars recognise in principle the historical variability of their subject matter, IR theory is often written as though relatively timeless qualities of the modern international system are the most significant. The system is commonly described as ‘Westphalian’, as though the principles of sovereignty established by the 1648 treaty have defined its fundamental structure to this day. Although this understanding has been described as a ‘myth’ from a Marxist perspective (Teschke 2006), and scholarship from the English School (e.g. Buzan and Little 2000) has increasingly offered historically richer understandings, systematic integration of macro-historical perspective and international theory remains relatively rare. On the other side, although international historians offer voluminous interpretations of the recent past of international relations, most are deterred by the pervasive empiricism of historical studies from theorizing macro-historical frameworks.

IR’s problem with history is, of course, a variant of a common problem of the social sciences, long answered in principle by Max Weber’s (2011 [1949]) proposal for a division of labour between the generalizing, concept-producing social sciences and a historical field concerned with explaining particular events and patterns. This left, of course, the question of how the division was to be bridged. Answering mid-twentieth-century’s sociology’s own version of the grand theory-empiricism dilemma, C. Wright Mills (1959) proposed that the social sciences should focus on mid-range, macro- and meso-historical trends. Mills’ answer has informed the sub-field of historical sociology, some of whose practitioners (like Michael Mann 1986, 1993, 2012) have tackled international change and have stimulated proposals (e.g. Hobden and Hobson 2002) that historical sociology is the answer to IR’s theory-history problem.

Historical sociology frames international relations together with social relations in general, refusing the exaggerated separation of international from domestic relations that has been the hallmark, not only of realist, but also of some constructivist IR.

So far however, historical-sociological interpretations of international relations have been modest in scope. Moreover, like historical sociology in general, historical-sociological IR has often focused on earlier periods of modernity and offers little direct assistance with the task of framing the present that is the focus of most IR research. This is a serious lacuna because history comprises the present and the future as well as the past. The idea that only the past can be studied historically is fallacious because history is the interconnection of all three phases: our relationship with the past is mediated by our present concerns and future projections as much as the latter are laden with ideas of what has happened before.

As an example of these challenges and possibilities of historical-sociological IR, I outline my latest study of the problem of genocide (Shaw 2013). This is generally the subject of interdisciplinary study, in which concepts developed in international law and by sociologists have been deployed mainly by historians studying specific cases. The field suffers, however, from a domestic fallacy, according to which even episodes like the Holocaust – in which Nazi Germany destroyed Jewish and other populations mainly conquered through international war – are frequently described as ‘domestic’ genocides. The stage is then set for a definition of the field as the comparative study of discrete national episodes, which are studied transhistorically rather than in historical international contexts. Thus the Holocaust and Rwanda have frequently been compared in the literature, rather than the former being linked to Stalinist and other genocide in Europe during the Second World War, or the latter to genocide elsewhere in the African Great Lakes in the late twentieth century.

IR has been a late-comer to this topic, as to most, and has adapted to this domestication of genocide by conceptualizing the international relations of genocide primarily in terms of the responses of Western powers and international organizations to the domestically-produced genocides of authoritarian and failed non-Western states. A few IR-influenced studies (e.g. Midlarsky 2005) have proposed that the production of genocide should also be studied in international context, but the idea has not been followed through in a systematic way. Rather, the running has been made by historians, primarily those working on colonization, who have confronted the evident difference between the diverse patterns of often small-scale ‘colonial genocides’, over several centuries and continents, from the European stereotype derived from the Holocaust. Mark Levene (2005) has proposed that the international system, in the Westphalian sense, is generally implicated in genocide. However, I argue that it is not the system, in the most general sense, but particular historical complexes of international relations – such as the one international historian Donald Bloxham (2007) examines in ‘the great game of genocide’ in south-eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – which are determining.

My study starts from the premise that genocide (which I define as the targeted destruction of civilian population groups) is chameleon-like, in the sense that Clausewitz described war, changing its nature as well as its appearances from one period to the next. In this perspective, I develop a narrative of genocide in a relatively short historical frame, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, and identify substantial changes in this period. Just as genocide changed between colonial contexts and contexts of imperial crisis in Europe in the early twentieth century, it changed again in the Cold War, decolonizing and post-colonial genocide of the late twentieth century. It is mutating once more in the state-fragmenting, civil war-linked and democratizing genocide of the twenty-first century. Where the early twentieth century saw as statization of genocide, later developments have seen destatization, with non-state actors increasingly important components of complex coalitions of state and non-state actors. I examine different types of international structuring of genocide: for example, the regional generalization of genocide in Europe resulting from the global war-system of 1939-45, and the more limited patterns resulting from the regional war-system in former Yugoslavia and transnational, refugee-fuelled conflicts in the Great Lakes and elsewhere in Africa.

My thesis is therefore that different patterns of genocide are broadly synchronized with major historical changes in the international system. I focus on two important transitions, from the inter-imperial to the Cold War system, and from the latter to the post-Cold War global system. I examine the patterns of genocide in the three periods defined by these watersheds: the climax of inter-imperial conflict in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century; the period of the Cold War, decolonization and post-colonial states in the second half; and the post-Cold War period of global democratization and international institutional-building. I pay particular attention to the transitional phases themselves: the immediate post-1945 years of international order-making in which the Genocide Convention itself was adopted; and the post-1989 years in which hopes of global genocide-prevention were raised. I argue that each of the three main periods shows sharply different patterns of genocide, which can be related to the different characters of the international system. I support this by contending that transition periods in the international system are also periods of transition in the history of genocide, in which projects for overcoming genocide have been dwarfed by new manifestations of the problem.

Without the historical perspective at the core of this study, it would, I contend, be difficult even to identify the changing forms of genocide. It would be even more difficult to offer a coherent explanation of diverse and complex patterns, and to make sense of their relationships to the international system. Without the thick concept of the system which a historical-sociological perspective offers, it would be difficult to connect the anarchy of inter-state relations to patterns of violence. This kind of historical-sociological IR perspective involves more, however, than a connection of international relations theory with international history, although historical work forms an invaluable resource. In approaching the present and future, as my study does, the work carried out by other social scientists (political scientists, sociologists, geographers and anthropologists) becomes more important than that of historians. A historically framed IR needs to be historical-sociological if it is to fully grasp the questions of transformation which must lie at its heart, and it needs to enrich international theory from a variety of sources.

—

Professor Martin Shaw is a sociologist of global politics, war and genocide, currently Research Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), and Professorial Fellow in International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Roehampton, London. He is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex and writes regularly at http://www.martinshaw.org.

References

Bloxham, D. (2007) The Great Game of Genocide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Buzan, B. and Little, R. (2000) International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hobson, J. and Hobden, S,. (2002) Historical Sociology of International Relations.

Levene, M. (2005) The Meaning of Genocide. London: I.B. Tauris.

Midlarsky, M. (2005) The Killing Trap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mills, C.W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mann, M. (1986, 1993, 2012) The Sources of Social Power. 3 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shaw, M. (2013) Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Upheavals of the Late Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Teschke, B. (2006) The Myth of 1648. London: Verso.

Weber, M. (2011 [1949]) The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New Brunswick: Transaction.

Review of Global Civil Society 2012: Ten Years of Critical Reflection

Posted: May 13, 2013 in globalization and democratisation, reviews
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New review for the LSE Review of Books

Global Civil Society 2012: Ten Years of Critical Reflection. Mary Kaldor, Henrietta L. Moore and Sabine Selchow (eds). Palgrave Macmillan. 2012.

2012-yearbook-jacket-FINAL-Cropped-203x261

Global civil society is an idea of the period since the end of the Cold War: it has reformulated the old idea of civil society for the new global era. The original concept had, of course, several previous incarnations: once a synonym for the free market economy, it was influentially reshaped by Antonio Gramsci as an idea of the social space beyond both state and market, and most recently was transformed as the theme of movements for change in Stalinist Eastern Europe. This last incarnation helped shape its importance for progressive thinking after the Cold War, and the 1990s saw the global version take wing as a major concept of the social sciences. Here it mainly captured the possibilities of transnational social movements and non-governmental organisations to extend the reach of traditional national civil society into the burgeoning arenas of global politics.

By the turn of the millennium it seemed that global civil society’s time had come, and on the initiative of Mary Kaldor, long associated with civil society ideas in the 1980s peace and democracy movements, the London School of Economics provided the base from which the ambitious series of Global Civil Society Yearbooks was launched. From the start, the creative tension between the normative and analytical functions of the idea was evident. Yet few could have predicted that within days of the first publication in late 2001, the 9/11 attacks would have drastically reshaped world politics and radically challenged the assumptions of secular growths in globality and civility. This was the first of three world shocks that have punctuated the Yearbook’s first decade, to be followed in 2008 by the financial crisis and in 2011 by the Arab Spring. All three have changed the terms in which global society has been thought about and reshaped the original normative-analytical tension.

The Yearbook has survived these challenges and others closer to home (not least its movement between three publishers over the decade). It now celebrates its tenth edition, the first in which neither of Kaldor’s founding co-editors, Helmut Anheier and Marlies Glasius, joins her in producing the volume, although they combine with her to offer an introductory balance-sheet of their subject and their decade of joint work. They open with the Middle Eastern events of 2011, and the claim that “however these events unfold, an active civil society has begun a movement for democracy across the region.” They insist on civil society’s non-violent character, but warn of “low-level pervasive violence” where states fail to restrain it. It is a pitfall of the yearbook format, especially when it offers an annual review, to be overtaken by events: clearly the authors did not foresee the horrors of the Syrian war in 2012-13. Yet the commentary demonstrates a consistent feature of the editorial steer, the combination of optimism about the possibilities of civil society organisation to weaken authoritarianism with a realistic understanding that violence is rarely far away.

In a defining chapter of this volume, Kaldor evaluates the vicissitudes of the principles of humanitarian protection in the face of crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur and Libya. She ends on a cautiously optimistic note, hoping that “the end of the decade of the War on Terror will open up space for the revival of the humanitarian idea.”

Yet for Kaldor, Anheier and Glasius, and indeed for the many contributors to this as to previous volumes, these directly political and military contexts are only part of the evolving story of global civil society. President George W. Bush’s anti-terror campaign may have crystallised a ‘regressive globalism’ – of which violent Islamism was another face – as I put it in a contribution to the 2003 volume. But civil society has continued to expand and renew itself in many ways that do not depend on the macro-political context, and a valuable function of the Yearbook has always been to chart and explore the changing patterns.

The 2000s have been the decade of both alter-globalisation and an ongoing search for economic alternatives to the discredited financial order exposed by the economic crisis, which has led to a veritable depression in much of Europe including the UK. These issues are represented here by thoughtful chapters by Robin Murray and Geoffrey Pleyers. But perhaps above all, from a long-term perspective, they were the decade in which the internet became the prime means through which civil society was simultaneously expressed and further globalised. A chapter by Kaldor’s new co-editors, Henrietta Moore and Sabine Selchow, examines the implications of this shift and suggests that it is rebuilding the “island of meaning” in terms of which the Yearbook initially conceptualised global civil society.

Thinking through the implications of this development, it is evident that the perspective with which Kaldor and her collaborators have approached global civil society over the last decade has not only captured an essential question of our times, but has confronted issues that will only become more central to world society throughout the twenty-first century. We must hope that the Yearbook will still be with us in some form – perhaps itself online in a more comprehensive way than its present Facebook page – to help us interpret the radical social changes that globalisation will continue to bring.

Genocide and International Relations: new book

Posted: May 6, 2013 in genocide, globalization and democratisation
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Martin Shaw, Genocide and International Relations coverI have now finished the final corrections to Genocide and International Relations, and Cambridge University Press expect to have copies available in October. This book moves on from the conceptual focus of What is Genocide? (2007) to develop an interpretation of historical and contemporary patterns.

With the subtitle Changing Patterns in the Upheavals of the Late Modern World, the book looks at the changes in the conditions that produce genocide, its locations and forms, in the course of the last century. Whereas most of the literature presents genocide as a series of discrete episodes exhibiting similar features, my book emphasises the linkages between episodes in regional, international contexts, and the mutable, chameleon-like quality of genocide.

In particular I argue – hence the title – that genocide has changed with changes in international relations, from the colonial genocides of the nineteenth century and earlier to the European genocide of the first half of the twentieth century, and from the latter to the Cold War, decolonizing and post-colonial genocide of the later part of the century, and finally the genocidal violence of messy civil wars and electoral conflicts that characterizes the present period.

A particular feature of the book is its critical focus on the international transitions, after 1945 and 1989, which have given rise to projects for overcoming genocide. These transitions, I argue, have involved shifts in the patterns and contexts of genocide, not decisive transcendence.

This book is framed by a critique of dominant trends in genocide studies. It argues that the field has been compromised by the idea that genocide in general, like the Holocaust, is a ‘sacred evil’ type of violence, so that a key goal of scholarship is to underpin claims to genocide-recognition.

I criticise the narrow vision of comparative genocide studies in which genocide is viewed mainly as a ‘domestic’ phenomenon of states. In contrast, my study emphasises the international contexts of genocide, seeking to specify more precisely the changing relationships between genocide and the international system.

You can preorder by following this link;

Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Upheavals of the Late Modern World.

Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, review

Posted: May 2, 2013 in genocide, genocide reviews
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A draft of my review of this important new book, published this month in the Journal of Genocide Research, 15, 2, 2013.

Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: Harper, 2012.

What happened in Spain in the 1930s has hardly been reckoned with in that country even eight decades afterwards. However, it is also underestimated in prevailing Western scholarly understandings of twentieth-century history, which tend to see the Spanish events as a tragic prelude to the main global struggle that broke out in 1939, just after Francisco Franco’s Nationalists had consolidated their seizure of power. It is particularly neglected in genocide studies, which tend to depict genocide in the 1948 Convention’s terms as an attack on ethnic, national, racial and religious groups, and hardly recognize the genocidal character of attacks on politically and class-defined populations.

Thus we think about the Spanish events primarily as a ‘civil war’, and remind ourselves that such wars are particularly brutal, an idea recently encapsulated in Stathis Kalyvas’s idea that there is a particular type of ‘civil war violence’ that civilians help to produce through their centrality to the dissemination of information and the settling of local scores. This may well be true. But this challenging new book by Paul Preston, the foremost English-speaking historian of 1930s Spain, suggests that much more was at stake.

The events of 1936-1939 were more than a civil war. Rather, the military rebellion against the Republic involved an attempt to exterminate the left in Spain, not only in a political sense, by destroying its Republican, Socialist, Anarchist and Communist parties, but in a social sense, by destroying all movements of exploited workers and agricultural labourers seeking to improve their generally wretched living conditions. The rebellion, after half a decade of ‘social war’, was an enterprise by a large section of the military’s upper ranks, aided and abetted by substantial sections of the rightwing parties, Church and property-owning classes, to put a definitive end to what they saw as a ‘Bolshevik-Jewish-Freemason’ conspiracy and an ‘un-Spanish’, Russian-inspired revolt against the natural, divinely sanctioned order of Spanish society.

Preston explores this theme in a book that I can only describe as relentless in its depiction of the rebels’ campaign of atrocities. I am often asked, when I describe my field of interest, whether it is not disturbing to read and think about genocide. That is undoubtedly the case, but Preston’s catalogue of unspeakable violence is among the worst that has come my way in a long time. The character of his narrative reflects, however, the rebels’ own relentless exterminatory thrust, and since he draws on a huge range of recent Spanish local and regional as well as national research, he vividly depicts the horrors of their army’s advance and its aftermath, village by village and town by town. The reader is drawn willy-nilly into the appalling ends of so many men, women and children, most of them ‘guilty’––if of anything at all, since the execution of the violence was often random as well as selective––of little more than supporting the Republic, a Republican party, or one of the social movements of the early 1930s.

One of the most striking features of the book is the repeated murder of Republican leaders and public officials, national and local, however moderate they were in the spectrum of Republican opinion. Indeed, one learns to expect that if a local mayor or national minister has shown any interest in protecting rightwingers from leftwing violence, then he will inevitably meet the most gruesome end once he falls into the rebels’ hands. But this was no mere ‘politicide’: the mass shootings of labourers, the extensive rapes and murders of Republican women, the appalling repression of Republican populations, the brutality against Republican children and their organized theft in the aftermath of the war, together with the suppression of Catalan, Basque, and Galician identities, all testify to a broader destructive process.

Preston does not neglect leftwing violence before, during, or after the military rebellion. He shows, however, that violence against landowners, clergy and pro-rebel politicians was often provoked by extreme exploitation or rebel atrocities. It was never part of an overall campaign of extermination comparable to that pursued by the rebels, and almost everywhere involved fewer victims. But there were important exceptions, notably anarchist-inspired violence against rightwingers and clergy, and Stalinist-led mass murders of rightwing prisoners in Madrid and so-called ‘Trotskyists’ in Barcelona, even if these were disowned by the Republic’s Socialist and Republican national leaders. The leaders of the military rebellion, on the other hand, clearly backed its exterminatory violence. Indeed, Franco more than once forewent an opportunity for military gain in order to complete repression in the rear.

Preston uses the term ‘Spanish Holocaust’ to include the mass violence on both sides, and he justifies this–despite recognising the differences from the Nazi Holocaust–on the grounds that the violent conflagration affected large sections of Spanish society. He does not engage with the genocide literature, but his work has many resonances with its recent themes. He shows the role that colonial brutalism and racism played in forming the Spanish military’s contempt for the working masses: they were regarded as no more than subhuman natives deserving of extreme reprisals. He emphasizes the influence of antisemitic ideology in rightwing Spanish nationalism, resonating with international fascism as well as the country’s earlier genocidal expulsions of Moors and Jews. The rebels’ extreme violence was well rehearsed in violent discourses over the preceding years.

From Preston we can conclude, therefore, that the Spanish Holocaust was no national sideshow but an important part of the exterminatory momentum of international politics that climaxed in the Second World War. We tend to think, following Lemkin, of European genocide as targeted against national and ethnic groups. Yet in the 1930s, in Spain as in Soviet Russia, violence was organized primarily on a class basis, even if subordinate nationalities were also targets. In Germany too during this period, of course, the Nazis ‘came for’ the Communists, Socialists and trade unionists as well as the Jews. The exclusion of destructive violence against ‘political groups’ and social classes from the scope of genocide is not only theoretical and moral nonsense, but ahistorical, since this violence was a crucial link in the road to Auschwitz.

What is Genocide? video

Posted: March 13, 2013 in genocide
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I have recorded a video, What is Genocide?, summarising my views on the meaning of genocide. This is based on the arguments of my 2007 book of the same title.

This is the first video on my YouTube channel, martinshaw34. Forthcoming videos will deal with the arguments of my new book, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Upheavals of the Late Modern World, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in the autumn. I will also post videos on more topical issues from time to time.

You can subscribe directly to the YouTube channel – or if you follow this blog, you will receive information every time a new video is posted.

The University of Roehampton’s Crucible Centre has also posted a new video interview with me.

 

Paths to change: peaceful vs violent

Posted: February 5, 2013 in Arab world, the left, war and peace
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A new post on openDemocracy

It is now two years since the “Arab spring” spread popular protest across the one world-region still overwhelmingly dominated by authoritarian rulers, and thus heralded a major new phase of the democratic upheavals that have transformed the world over recent decades. These largely peaceful mass movements achieved remarkable, if qualified, successes in Tunisia and Egypt: qualified, because their transformation remains conflicted, their aspirations to fundamental political change have been contained, and their very impact has released many new social problems that they are not yet in a position to solve.

In two countries, moreover, non-violent protests were largely overtaken by violent campaigns. In Libya, activists took up arms after peaceful protests were brutally repressed,  improvising an insurgency that the west first saved from defeat and then aided to victory; and in Syria, an initially peaceful uprising equally met with repression slowly turned into a destructive and messy civil war that ended hopes of peaceful change and, after two years, offers an increasingly bleak prospect. If Libya can be counted a success of sorts, Syria’s suffering represents a terrible failure that casts a shadow over the hopes for democratic change in the entire Arab world.

The experiences of Libya and Syria, in the context of the Arab spring as a whole, pose questions about the relationship between violence and non-violence in political change, and whether alternative roads and results were possible:

* Could the original peaceful Libyan opposition have survived Gaddafi’s violence and re-emerged, either in the short or medium term, to remove the regime without taking up arms?

* Why did the Syrian opposition, which followed a peaceful course much longer, finally succumb to violence? Did this shift genuinely improve the chances of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad’s regime? If it did, has it been worth the additional suffering caused to so many people? Was there another, better path that could have been based on expanding the non-violent opposition?

Choices and costs

The questions are too complex for short or easy answers. But what these intractable situations make clear is that peaceful movements have offered no guarantee of change, and that violent opposition has succeeded only with substantial external help, which brings its own problems. This very lack of clarity is an invitation to revisit the fundamental choice between peaceful and violent methods in political change. In this respect, a timely academic study by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan – Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict – offers valuable insight.

The authors use the methods of political science to test the strategic alternatives of violent and non-violent resistance across 323 cases from 1900-2006. They both attempt to quantify “successes” and “failures” (defined according to the stated goals of resistance movements, and discernible evidence that their actions have contributed to their achievement) and develop in-depth case-studies and nuanced arguments that reflect the diversity of historical experience. This multi-method framework raises its own questions, from the inevitable difficulties faced by generalists in understanding and classifying many different examples (and some of the authors’ specific judgments are certainly open to debate); but the approach seems broadly successful in neutralising any fundamental challenge to their arguments and conclusions.

Chenoweth and Stephan argue that the “participation advantage” of civil resistance ensures it works better than armed resistance. The evidence, they say, shows that non-violence is capable of mobilising large sections of a population against an authoritarian regime, of undermining regime support, and even of securing significant defections from within the elite. The broader support gained by non-violent movements typically increases the costs to regimes of resisting change, and repression against non-violent movements is much more likely to backfire. But if such movements fail to achieve sufficient breadth, they may fail to achieve their goals (as in Burma prior to the recent opening).

The authors also recognise, however, that armed resistance can work when it is more successful in mobilising popular support, or (a crucial factor) when it has external support. Non-violent movements often benefit from some limited types of international backing, but rarely depend as much on the latter as do armed movements. But the success of arms often carries a further cost in the aftermath of change, say the authors, in that armed movements are much less likely than non-violent ones to lead to the establishment of a democratic regime.

In comparing violent and non-violent campaigns in the same national contexts, the study shows that the latter are invariably more effective both in mobilising larger numbers of people, and generally so in achieving their objectives. But the authors are sceptical of the argument proposed by some scholars that a violent campaigns can act as a complement to larger social movements – a sort of “radical flank” that enables “moderates” to win; rather, they say, violence is likely to harden regime support that might otherwise crumble in the face of peaceful protest. They note that while violence is often justified as a “last resort” where non-violence is supposed to have failed, it is rare that movements resorting to violence have come near to exhausting the possibilities of non-violence.

At the same time, the study does not fully address the question of whether taking up arms cuts off possibilities of peaceful change and damages wider non-violent movements. Why Civil Resistance Works appears to have been completed in the initial phases of the Arab spring, since when the hard cases of the Arab spring have got even harder, so it cannot tell activists in Benghazi or Aleppo or what they should have done or should be doing.

Yet the work offers a sobering basis for reflection of the present course of events. The bloody stalemate in Syria’s civil war, and the recharging of the ill-judged “war on terror” in the linked Malian/Algerian crises, make it even more relevant to question the primacy of violent methods as a way to achieve change. They also highlight the need to ask what might have been, if rigorous and imaginative policies of non-violent resistance had been universally maintained.

Israel and Hamas: momentum of war

Posted: November 26, 2012 in Israel / Palestine
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My new article on openDemocracy, where I write regularly.

The latest war over Gaza leaves unchanged the underlying roots of conflict, even as regional changes are narrowing the potential for a long-term settlement.

Israel’s week-long war against Hamas and Gaza was – assuming the ceasefire of 21 November 2012 holds and there is no immediate resumption – shorter and less murderous than the campaign launched in late December 2008, which lasted three weeks. But it still cost the lives of more than 160 Palestinians, against five Israelis; a disparity that mirrors the gap between the approximately 1,400 Palestinian and thirteen Israeli fatalities (including five from “friendly fire”) last time.

Hamas’s rockets kill only erratically. The Israeli victims are especially unlucky, because most missiles are poorly targeted and many are shot down. The large number of Gazan victims, on the other hand, is the predictable consequence of Israel’s intensively bombarding a densely populated urban area. Hamas makes no bones about randomly terrifying and occasionally killing Israeli civilians. Israel claims its violence is precisely targeted and aims to avoid civilian death, but it knows that many civilians will die as the inevitable consequence of the methods it adopts.

On the surface, Israel’s war was highly limited, apparently aimed at weakening Hamas’s capacity to make further missile attacks (Alan Johnson claims that Hamas’s deadliest new weaponry was destroyed on the first day of the attacks). It is on the face of it absurd to marry “surgical” strikes with such significant anti-population violence. It only makes sense if Israel’s war was an extensive attack on Hamas’s political infrastructure as well as its armour, and a continuation “by other means” of the collective punishment of Gazans, underway since 2006.

Indeed, overt Gazan celebration of Israeli civilian injuries, after the bombing of a Tel Aviv bus, is mirrored in Israeli hostility to the Gaza population. Gilad Sharon, son of late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, expressed this officially unstated rationale of the Israeli attack when he told London-based Channel 4 News that the Gazans should expect what they were getting, after having voted for Hamas. Sharon actually calls for Gaza to be “flattened” in the same way that the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It is shocking to hear the degenerate rationale that makes whole civilian populations targets of violence being invoked not in total war, but in a so-called “surgical” attack.

Unfortunately, Sharon’s comments are not aberrations, but reflect the underlying sharpening of Israel’s conflicts with its neighbours. The Arab spring has produced official Egyptian support for Hamas, which has shrewdly distanced itself from the Syrian and Iranian regimes while still benefiting from the deadlier missiles that Iran now boasts of supplying. Israel regards itself as facing an “existential threat” from Iran’s prospective development of nuclear weapons. Some have even suggested that a rationale of the attack on Gaza is to pre-emptively secure its southern flank in case of war with Iran.

Thus Israel perceives itself as engaged in all-out struggle to survive, even when it is not. Paradoxically the policies that this perception enables could, in a worst case, produce a real existential issue in the future. Repeated Israeli aggressions against neighbouring peoples, as well as rulers, will only harden still further the deep Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel that has developed since the state was founded in 1948, amidst the forced removal of most of Palestine’s Arabs.

Israel’s military superiority and, as (Paul Rogers highlights) the deep backing it receives from Washington, mean that Israel should be in a position to reach a relatively favourable settlement of its conflict with the Palestinians. Yet the combination of three factors is probably narrowing the window for such a settlement: because Palestinians (even Hamas) enjoy more active Arab support, because the civil war in Syria threatens to spread violence and destabilise neighbouring states, and because an Israeli attack on Iran could provoke a general regional war. This is a potentially lethal brew.

Paul Rogers may be right that there is a “chance of change” if President Obama uses the first part of his new term to tackle the situation. But in Israel as in Gaza, forces that have shown little interest in serious engagement are in charge. In this war, Israel’s prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu and Hamas have reinforced each other’s dominant positions in their respective political arenas. Netanyahu rules through a right-wing coalition which encourages the settlements that are whittling away the prospects of a Palestinian state on the West Bank. It is not obvious that he wants to, or even could, make the sorts of adjustment that any movement towards peace will require. Nor is it obvious that Obama will show the determination needed to force a change.

So, as Bernard Avishai comments, Israel has been playing with fire. The medium-term prospects are as likely to be a more serious war as a movement towards peace. In such a war, the sections of the Israeli right that aim to expel Palestinians from Israel itself and further “Judaise” the state could gain ground. In a corresponding radicalisation of Israel’s enemies, the apocalyptic hype of Iranian and Hamas demagogues might start to move from empty rhetoric to serious threat. Obama’s task is not just to move things forward, but to stop them getting a whole lot worse.

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