The war between Hamas and Israel attracts an easy interpretation: violence is more effective than politics. However, wars are also politics, and without a political solution, no conflict really ends.
Ilmari Kaishkö Docent of Military Sciences
News from Ukraine and now from Israel and Palestine create a stark contrast to the post-Cold War era. Back then, hope and optimism lived in the West. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the confrontation between the democratic first world and the communist second world ended.
The threat of war and nuclear war dissipated. Europe remembered the Second World War and the Holocaust, and said: Never again! The European Union grew into a peace project emphasizing solidarity, cooperation and interdependence, which calmed the formerly warlike Europeans. The organization even got Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
After the Cold War, “real” wars began to be considered impossible.
States’ defense budgets began to be reduced, as “real” wars were considered impossible. Prefixes began to be invented for those wars that were still being fought despite everything. There was talk of “new”, “asymmetric”, “unusual” – and after Russia seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 – “hybrid” wars.
Finland fell apart after the Cold War gradually towards the west, but our perception of the war did not change much. The war interested me just as much as before. But to make things worse, we were only interested in a war where we were on one side – and the Russians were on the other side.
Our traditional thinking about war has now been praised after Russia attacked Ukraine, and when other countries are in a hurry to improve their defenses. But our traditional, and some say pessimistic, thinking about war can also be criticized as narrow-minded.
Finnish war research still focuses on violence at the expense of politics.
For example, compared to other Nordic countries, Finland’s investments in military research have been small. Instead of wide-ranging social research, Finnish Military Science is narrowly focused to martial arts – that is, for warfare in Finnish conditions.
Perhaps the most central question in military science the nature of war has received little attention in Finnish research. A military scientist Carl von Clausewitz stated already in the 19th century that war is the continuation of politics by means of violence. Still, Finnish research still only focuses on violence at the expense of politics.
Wars considered “unconventional” are in fact “conventional” wars.
The ideal of the Finnish war – if you can talk about such a thing at all – seems to be a repeat of the winter war. In that, Finland is saved by the Defense Forces Battlefield 2020– video, in a battle for resolution in a tangled conifer forest. In Finnish terms, war is a violent roaring in nature without a political context.
Most of the world’s wars are not like that. This was most recently reminded by the extremist organization Hamas’s attack on Israel. The attack can be better seen as the latest phase of a decades-long political conflict.
Most of the world’s wars also take place within states. Wars considered “unconventional” are in fact “conventional” wars.
Such wars are complex, unclear and dirty in a way that we are not used to in our thinking. We don’t, although we also have our experience of such wars: we just don’t want to remember our own civil war let alone tribal wars.
Of course, the stakes in traditional interstate wars are so high that it is of course necessary to prepare for them. Defense cannot be left to luck. But the odds are that when war comes, it will be a prefix war.
Then it is necessary to better understand the political dimension of the war as well. For example, the war between Hamas and Israel is unlikely to find a long-term solution this time through violence alone.
In Israel and Palestine, the obstacles to peace have been politicians, for whom it has been easier to continue the war than to strive for lasting peace.
According to Clausewitz, everything is very simple in war, but even the simplest things are difficult. We often take peace for granted. Peace, on the other hand, is initially difficult, but ultimately kind of easy.
In Israel and Palestine, the obstacle to peace has above all been the politicians, for whom it has been easier to continue the war than to strive for lasting peace. However, violence has not been able to solve the political knot from its starting point. Human suffering has only postponed the solution to the problem.
A permanent solution is a political solution. Several former heads of the Israeli army’s Central Intelligence Service, who were responsible for the fight against terrorism, come to the same idea in the award-winning Gatekeepers– in the documentary film. It was already completed in 2012.
Ilmari Käihkö
The author is a military scientist who fears that he will witness several more wars between Israel and Palestinian extremist organizations in his lifetime.
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