Is the Conflict in the Middle East an Absolute War?

Thomas Edward Lawrence, the Oxford archeologist who became the famous “Lawrence of Arabia,” wrote a narrative of his adventures participating in the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I. At an important point in the Arab revolt, Lawrence was given the opportunity to be of great influence in the war. He was as surprised by this as many who knew him would have been. He was suffering from illness but reflected about the progress Sharif Feisal, the future king of Saudi Arabia, had made in what he called the “Hejaz war.” 

He summed up the achievement of Feisal’s consolidation of power from the Arab clans by saying, “Out of every thousand square miles of Hejaz nine hundred and ninety-nine were now free.” He felt as though the goals of the Arabs had been achieved, since he had concluded that the revolt was about Arab freedom from the Turks. Feisal had insisted that the fighting was not with any group of people that spoke Arabic. Lawrence was thrilled when he heard one of the leaders say that the war was not about Turkish pretensions of the caliphate or Islamic heresy but only Arab independence.

Musing on what he remembered from his reading of classic military tomes, he compared the theories of two of the most famous military theoreticians of his time, General Ferdinand Foch and the German Carl von Clausewitz. According to Clausewitz, there were, wrote Lawrence, “all sorts of war…personal wars, joint-proxy duels, for dynastic reasons…expulsive wars, in party politics…commercial wars, for trade objects…two wars seemed seldom alike. Often the parties did not know their aim, and blundered till the march of events took control.”

Foch, who eventually became the French Field Marshall in World War I, had written about a different kind of war. 

In modern war—absolute war he called it—two nations professing incompatible philosophies put them to the test of force. Philosophically, it was idiotic, for while opinions were arguable, convictions needed shooting to be cured; and the struggle could end only when the supporters of the one immaterial principle had no more means of resistance against the supporters of the other. It sounded like a twentieth century restatement of the wars of religions, whose logical end was utter destruction of one creed, and whose protagonists believed that God’s judgment would prevail.

Foch had said, recalled Lawrence, that such a war “was impossible with professional armies…To me the Foch war seemed only an exterminative variety, no more absolute than another. One could as explicably call it ‘murder war.’” It is probable that the French generalissimo saw World War I in those terms because he called the severe Versailles Treaty weak and only a truce for twenty years, as Churchill recalled him saying. The vengeance exacted at Versailles, think many historians, set the stage for the next world war.

I could not help thinking of the present Middle East while reading T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It dealt, after all, with the same geographic area where local conflict threatens to explode into global war. What caught my attention was that Lawrence ruled out Foch’s
interpretation in the late twenties of the last century when he wrote his book and yet what is going on in the Mideast seems to be something like that “absolute war” envisioned by Foch.

The Palestinian leadership, at least that which commands attention, professes a belief that only the destruction of Israel can bring justice and peace to the region. The savage atrocities of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens by their extremism seem to symbolically express that there is no turning back. The fierce Israeli counterattack, with its high technology, did not evidence the rapes, murders, and mutilations of Hamas but nevertheless showed an indifference to world opinion and a tolerance of collateral damage and victims that was frightening. The fierce Israeli counterattack, with its high technology, did not evidence the rapes, murders, and mutilations of Hamas but nevertheless showed an indifference to world opinion and a tolerance of collateral damage and victims that was frightening.Tweet This

The so-called wars of religion were usually about conversion, not extermination. Conversion is certainly not a goal evident in the present Middle East conflict. The wars are a tapestry of issues and historical trends woven into an impossibly complex fabric. It is a national dispute, because one nation is set against a potential one. It is an ethnic conflict, because one language group and culture is at war with another. It is a clash of civilizations, with a Western-style democracy, although one identified as a “Jewish” state, at odds with a people whose “statehood,” is reduced to a verbal exercise, more a concept than a reality. 

Both groups function on an international level, but one is sophisticated and has the support of the most powerful nation on earth, while the other has a wide swath of sympathy around the world but more rhetorical than practical power. It is possible to say that much dark history colors the tapestry, the bloody red of the holocausts of Europe and the broadest of palettes with a range of colors evoking centuries of conquests and upheavals, of religious creativity and persecution, endurance and oppression.

Sometimes I wonder, as the aggrieved Arab population multiplies, whether the Jewish nation will share the fate of the Crusader states that lasted about a century before subsiding to the waves of neighbors and the loss of international support. Technological superiority is not guaranteed to last forever, nor is the uneasy balance of neighboring powers against each other (Shiite, Sunni, dynastic rivalry and Egyptian neutrality purchased by the United States, etc.) a solution that can be counted on indefinitely. 

The ingenious Israelis, high-tech and sophisticated, had to rely on Thai migrant laborers for their farms, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were without jobs a few miles away. Not that those people would want to be de facto serfs of the other, but how long can such workers be imported? Will the State of Israel be some kind of science fiction society automatized and protected by the most sophisticated weaponry and surveillance while enjoying the unstinting support of a country half the world away, one which seems in decline, especially in terms of inherited values and commitments? A tapestry exposed to such constant bad weather, with a weave as fragile as it is brittle, with aspects as arguable as any in history, with tensions so diametrically opposed as to make tearing inevitable—how long before the whole thing unravels?

The cliché about someone or something not having a prayer comes to mind. Actually, I think the whole situation only has prayer, because only God can get all of his children out of this mess. The hostess in Henry V, Part One, says that Falstaff, dying, “cried out, ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him he should not think of God. I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.” There is a need for all of us to be troubled by such thoughts, I think. “Solo Dios,” as some of the people would say in El Salvador about extreme situations, “Only God.”

[Photo: Buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City (Credit: Getty Images)]