I am fighting the feeling that there are few paths left to try.
Last week, as war broke out in my home, I was in Armenia, spending hours talking to people whose own lives have been wrecked by war. In September, thousands of people from Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated enclave inside Azerbaijan, were driven out by Azerbaijan’s lightning military assault. In a crumbling, Soviet-era kindergarten hastily repurposed as a shelter, people told me about their overwhelming sense of loss. One man just kept repeating, “Homeless, homeless, homeless.”
War is all around us. Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Israel: These aren’t just names, these are people’s lives. Some places, like Nagorno-Karabakh, in the far corners of the South Caucasus, are tragically easy for the world to forget, until they explode. Others, like Israel and Palestine, are always on the world’s mind, and they also explode.
Hamas’s savage attack was a shock — but not a surprise. We have all watched peacemaking fail here, as it often does. This isn’t just a crisis for grass-roots peace activists, it’s a grand failure on a global stage. Lately the whole notion of solving conflicts, containing violence through international rules and institutions, the international system itself, appears wholly inadequate to the task of protecting people and preventing wars.
One could be forgiven for asking, what international system? The global institutions so painstakingly built over decades seem to be no match at all for the things that really run the world: money, oil, arms, interests. The Armenians feel betrayed by the international community for its near-complete inaction in the face of Azerbaijan’s punishing, nine-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh since December, which left 120,000 people — mostly civilians — lacking enough food, medicine or fuel. The United Nations sent its first mission to the enclave in 30 years only after most Armenians had been driven out by the violence. Azerbaijan, too, was frustrated for nearly 30 years by the impotence of international law as seven additional areas of its sovereign territory conquered by Armenia during the 1990s war over Nagorno-Karabakh remained under control of Armenians.
Israel has scoffed at international law for decades by expanding settlements, annexing territory conquered in war, and suffocating the civilian population in Gaza through a 16-year blockade, with few repercussions. Countries that don’t like international courts — including the United States — largely ignore them. Vladimir Putin will probably avoid prosecution for his invasion of Ukraine. Hamas certainly had no concern for international prosecution or for the fate of the liberal rules-based world order when it slaughtered over 1,300 Israelis. Much of the world will view Israel’s unfolding and brutal retaliation — so far, more than 400 Palestinian children have been killed, according to the Palestinian health ministry — as justified.
