Monday 4 August 2014

Gaza and First World War

I woke this morning to the news that it’s exactly 100 years since the First World War began. An hour later I read Brian Eno’s letter about Gaza.

At first glance there is no obvious connection – other than being yet two more depressing punctuations in the litany currently being thrown at us.

Nevertheless, there is a direct connection. It is not just that war is mad, and utterly avoidable, if only we humans could rise above our darker natures. It is that the sad history of the First World War is still being played out.

A comfortable and self-serving interpretation of the First and Second World Wars pervades in the UK: German aggression in 1914 was outdone a quarter of a century later when the country, led by an evil genius, upped the ante by adding bestial war crimes and genocide to the mix. This interpretation is not wrong, but it only conveys one side of the story.

However awful and avoidable the descent into war may be, it at least leaves open the possibility of crafting a lasting peace after the guns fall silent. The allies had their chance to do just that in Versailles in 1919, but instead they produced the 20th century’s most catastrophic failure.

With huge war debts, France and Britain looked to Germany to accept guilt for the whole thing and thus pay for it all. This was both grotesquely unrealistic and unjust – not least because Germany had thrown in the towel voluntarily, rather than continue with the blood-letting right to the bitter end.

Wanting to ‘squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak’ appealed to the worst of human nature. It was driven by hatred and the pursuit of money above the virtues of compassion and fairness. Versailles created an ocean of resentment in Germany, with all the nutrients required for fascism to bloom.

Not content with that, the so-called ‘peace makers’ also saw fit to dismember the weakened Ottoman Empire. The colonial carve up took little notice of tribal divisions in the Arab world. The resulting frictions never ceased and today we live with the consequences. The latest chapter sees the artificial boundaries between Syria and Iraq being laid bare by Isis. We can be sure the troubles won’t stop there.

The British provided a similarly fertile breeding ground for future conflict in Palestine and Israel, with the Balfour declaration of 1917 and inglorious weakness after the Second World War. The conflict goes on to this day and Brian Eno grieves over one of its most recent, youngest, innocent victims.

So while Germany made war, Britain singularly failed to make peace. A centenary of the First World War began, I was left with this thought: it is not just stopping war that’s important, it’s also how we go about making peace.