"War is a necessary part of God's arrangement of the world…Without war the world would deteriorate into materialism."
- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.
The die was cast a long time ago.
When the state of Israel was created without an adjacent state of Palestine beside it, war was declared. And Israel won that war very decisively and easily for multiple generations because it had guts, technological edge, and powerful backers.
They still have all those things but it's not 1946 anymore.
The political decision to disenfranchise Palestine and block the formation of a sovereign state created an opening for all sorts of opportunistic actors in the region to make their name, the most successful of which have been Islamic fanatics.
Their political success would not be possible without the policies, choices, and direct interventions of Israel, England and the United States. This fact cannot be disputed.
Israel, America, and England chose war over peace at every opportunity. They chose fanaticism over compromise. They chose Islam over everything else in the region when they abandoned the Shah in favour of the Ayatollah in the late 1970s. They then doubled down on their strategy by supporting the Pakistani-backed Islamic opposition against the Russian-backed communist government in Afghanistan.
And it was a successful strategy. During the Cold War they short-sightedly riled up the Muslims to score political victories against Russia in Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. They won the Cold War. Congrats. Thumbs up.
But they lost the next war.
They ran away from Afghanistan after two decades of futile killing, gave Iraq away to the clerics, and reduced small nations like Libya, Yemen, and Syria to rubble because they mistake the destruction of towns and cities with victory.
Israel believes it can achieve total victory over the Palestinians. They are implementing a genocidal campaign in Gaza with some success so they may turn out to be right but there are still more Arabs and Muslims than Jews. Have they planned for the murder of them all? Do they want an all out war in the region? Do they not know that the extremist clerics who occupy Iran value an inch of Jerusalem's soil more than the whole Iranian nation?
The war won't be over when every Palestinian is dead or when Iranian cities are bombarded day and night. Since the Palestinian cause became a Muslim cause the war stopped being about Palestine. Islam put itself on trial. And Israel simply isn't strong, big, or wise enough to take down a whole religion in the court of war. They have to put their hate and desire aside and find a middle ground.
Ivan Pavlovych Lysiak Rudnytsky (27 October 1919 – 25 April 1984) was a historian of Ukrainian socio-political thought, political scientist and scholar publicist. He significantly influenced Ukrainian historical and political thought by writing over 200 historical essays, commentaries, and reviews, and also serving as editor of several book publications. He has been praised as one of the most influential Ukrainian historians of the twentieth century. He is sometimes referred to as Ivan Łysiak-Rudnytsky, but the surname he used was his mother’s name Rudnytsky.
According to Eastern Europe historian Timothy Snyder, Rudnytsky decisively argued against the proposition that Ukraine ought to be a homogeneous nation - that it should be exclusively for and about people who spoke Ukrainian and shared Ukrainian culture. Rudnytsky believed, as Mykhailo Hrushevsky did, in Ukraine's social historical continuity of development towards an independent democratic nation, and also believed, as Vyacheslav Lypynsky did, that its destiny was to be pluralistic. The opposing view in Ukraine was championed by Dmytro Dontsov who took his cues from Italian fascism and became the far right conservative voice of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism. According to Snyder, Rudnytsky’s response to ethnic nationalism won the argument, both in Ukraine and among North American Ukrainian expatriates, about what the Ukrainian nation should be. Instead of the nation looking for legitimacy in dubious historical claims or assertions of a homogeneous culture, Rudnytsky’s view was that a nation is fundamentally the result of political acts of commitment directed at a common future, which means that in principle, anyone can take part in it.
A striking difference between the historical development of the countries of Western Europe and that of those of the eastern half of the continent has been often observed. The former, particularly France and England, have enjoyed, in spite of some periods of revolutionary upheaval, a millennium of continuous growth. Germany's fate has been much less favorable, and farther to the east it is impossible to find any country which has not experienced, at one time or another, a tragic breakdown and an epoch of a national capitis deminutio, sometimes extending for centuries. Here one will think of the subjugation of the Balkanic peoples and Hungary by the Turks, of the crushing of Bohemia by Habsburg absolutism, of the partitions of Poland.
The Ukraine is a typically East European nation in that its history is marked by a high degree of discontinuity. The country suffered two major eclipses in the course of its development. The medieval Rus' received a crippling blow from the hands of the Mongols, was subsequently absorbed by Lithuania, and finally annexed to Poland. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Ukraine rose against Polish domination, and a new body politic, the Cossack State, came into existence. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the autonomy of the Cossack Ukraine was destroyed by the Russian Empire. A new upward cycle started in the nineteenth century. The movement of national regeneration culminated in the 1917 Revolution, when a Ukrainian independent state emerged, to succumb soon to Communist Russian control. This third, last great division of Ukrainian history, which lasts from the 1780's to the Revolution, and in a sense even to the present, forms what may be defined as "modern Ukrainian history."
"Antagonisms and passions block the way to an objectively accurate judgment of our own and of foreign interests. The self-conceit of the victor is quite as much of a hindrance to correct judgment, as the exasperation of the conquered." - Count István Tisza, March 15, 1914. From, "Papers of Count Tisza, 1914-1918" By Sidney B. Fay, The American Historical Review, 1924.
"During the Easter season the whole world was apprehensively watching a terrible bomb timed to explode on May 15 - the date on which the British, as they firmly and repeatedly announced, would abandon the intolerable burden of their mandate over the Holy Land. No one could foresee precisely what the consequences would be. But unless some miracle took place - unless Britain gave a last-minute consent to remain longer or to cooperate with others, or unless the United States or the United Nations secured some very speedy preventive action and prepared to use troops for the enforcement of law and order - it was a safe guess that Palestine would be torn with far more violence and bloodshed than hitherto.
Where is the blame? On many sides. To mention only the most important:
The British government is to blame for irreconcilable promises made to Arabs and Jews during World War I, and for a hesitating and indecisive policy ever since, until it could no longer endure the headache and therefore dumped the problem into the lap of the United Nations. In fair justice to the British, however, it must be said that they have done more both for the Jews and the Arabs than has any other nation.
President Roosevelt during World War II likewise encouraged conflicting hopes in both Arabs and Jews. President Truman made matters worse by urging the British to admit 100,000 Jewish immigrants into Palestine while at the same time refusing to accept any responsibility for the consequences; i.e. he would not send any American troops to preserve order in the likely event that the Arabs might oppose Jewish immigration by fighting. The British, who had long borne the burden alone, resented President Truman's attitude.
The Arabs and the Zionist Jews are to blame for their emotional insistence on their own points of view and their refusal to cooperate in various peaceful, but compromise, proposals.
Even Russia might be said to be to blame, because her exercise of the veto has weakened the United Nations, and her aggressive policy has made Britain and the United States fear the use of Russian troops, either alone or as part of an international police force, in maintaining law and order in Palestine.
Finally, Middle East oil is a factor of enormous strategic and economic importance. Its exploitation is one of the essential elements in the Marshall Plan. As American oil reserves are depleted, it will before long become an important article of import into the United States. At present its development and the pipelines, either being built or in the process, are mainly in the hands of British and American controlled companies; but those companies are threatened by the Arabs with trouble or annulment of their concessions if there is an attempt to enforce the partition of Palestine. Furthermore, Communist control in Western Europe or a Russian move into the Middle East, would deal a fatal blow to the favored hold which British and Americans now enjoy over Middle East oil. The settlement of Palestine thus involves not merely the Arabs and Zionists; it affects the far bigger problems of the most important military raw material and the relations between the totalitarian East and the democratic West." - Sidney B. Fay, "Arabs, Zionists, and Oil" Current History, Vol. 14, No. 81 (May 1948).
The wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land would come to an end overnight if the ruling circles in the United States and England wanted them to.
Over the course of both conflicts they have used every diplomatic and propaganda tool at their disposal to further the bloodshed and prevent any negotiations from taking place.
Encouraging small states to engage in wars over territory against their bigger, more powerful neighbours is asking for trouble.
What are their policy objectives in the war in Ukraine? To put political pressure on Putin, divide Russia internally, and break it up into small pieces? If so, then declare war officially on Russia, and stop using poor Ukraine as a battering ram. Sending dumb Ukrainians to their deaths for cheap political points is shameful.
Money alone doesn't win you wars. Great powers can't bribe their way to victory. Two decades of futility in Afghanistan proved that.
Ukraine is considered Holy ground in Russia, so they're willing to fight for generations there. And Putin has stated his military and political objectives very clearly and on multiple occasions. That's what a leader is supposed to do before committing his nation to war.
What are the U.S. and U.K. objectives in the Holy Land? The total annihilation of the Palestinians and the complete erasure of their history? If so, then join the war officially on the side of Israel and declare war on Palestine.
If not, then what's the alternative? Right now they are looking on and assisting Israel at every turn. Are they too afraid of the Zionist Lobby to change course? Have they been compromised and terrorized into silence and compliance?
The fact is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have and should have been solved decades ago had Washington been led by brave, smart, honest, and mature leaders. Instead its God-like power has attracted the worst of the worst over the decades after Kennedy's assassination and those in charge now can't even pretend to lead. They don't know how. They got into power by lying. And liars aren't leaders.
What the world needs now are true leaders. I think Putin might be the only one. And he isn't even that great because he went along with the Covid nonsense like the rest of them. Lukashenko was a better leader during that crazy period. But he still deserves credit for trying to make peace which is what real leaders do.
Preservation of the peace and punishment of offenders were dealt with in England, as elsewhere, partly under the customary jurisdiction of the local courts, partly by the special authority of the king. The expression "the King's peace," even now used in every indictment, comes to us from the Saxons. The origin of it is to be traced to the notion that a stranger who broke the peace of a house must make atonement to the head of that house. But in the Anglo-Saxon period the king's peace was not for all men or all places. In England probably as late as the Norman Conquest each househod had its individual "peace." The peace of the king was one thing, the peace of the lord of the manor, the peace of the churches, the peace of the sheriff, the peace of the homestead, were all quite other things: a multitude of jurisdictions imposed peace in a multitude of areas in a multitude of ways. But in no area was "peace" a verbal contrast with war: rather it conveyed the idea, dimly mirrored it may be, in the minds of men, of wholeness and soundness within the area whatever its size might be. But breach of the kings' peace was a much graver matter than an ordinary breach of public order. It made the wrongdoer the king's enemy. After the Norman Conquest the king's peace became the normal and general safeguard of public order. Slowly the idea of a "general peace" embracing the "peace" of the various customary jurisdictions was evolved, and the king's peace in the course of time coincided with this general peace. All jurisdictions, including that of the churches, were gradually absorbed by the king's peace, which became, in the process of centuries, the peace first of England, then of all the Isles, and with the onward expansion of the race, of all the king's dominions oversea. The movement of absorption, long since practically concluded in England-though there manorial courts still possess a "peace" that is not the king's-may be observed in active operation to-day in the Empire of India.
The first extension of the Pax Regis beyond the royal residence was by a proclamation that the king's peace should be observed in all the land during the week of the coronation, at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide in every year. The next step was that the king could proclaim his peace in any particular locality. Offences against the king personally, e. g., treason, were always breaches of his peace.
The violation of the king's peace was the original offence from which the jurisdiction of the sovereign in criminal matters arose; and not only was it the practice that the king's justices should try breaches of his peace, but also that the king should be a party to the plea. It finally became the practice to allege every criminal wrong as being contra pacem domini regis; but there is good reason to suppose that felonies were at first the only crimes contra pacem, or, conversely, that crimes contra paccm were originally all felonies. The prosecution of violators of the peace by the sovereign sprang not so much from the Norman conception of the king as the foundation of justice, as from the Saxon idea of compensation to the sufferer for a wrong done.
If you injured me you must pay the b6t. If you injured the king by violating his peace, you must pay the fine due to him, and he, therefore, prosecuted.
For in Anglo-Saxon as well as in other Germanic laws, we find that the idea of wrong to a person or his kindred is still primary, and that of offence against the common weal secondary even in the gravest cases. Homicide appears in the AngloSaxon dooms as a matter for composition in the ordinary case of slaying in open quarrel. There are additional public penalties in aggravated cases, as when a man is slain in the king's presence, or otherwise in breach of the king's peace. But treason to one's lord, especially to the king, is a capital crime. A freeman's life has a regular value set upon it, called wergild, literally "man"s price," or "man-payment," or wer simply; while for injuries to the person short of death there is an elaborate tariff; for an eye so much, for a broken arm so much, and so on. To explain the phraseology of the time:
Wer was the pecuniary value set on a man's life increasing with his rank. It was also the measure of the fines payable by him for his own offences; for as the life of an earl was more precious than that of many ceorls, so his offences were the more grave.
Not only did the king's surroundings acquire special importance, but by the late seventh century he comes to have a recognised interest in peacekeeping elsewhere. In KentX the Laws of Hlothzr and Eadric, cc 11-13 imposed three separate fines on someone who insulted a guest in another's house or uncivilly removed a person's cup where men were dnnking: one went to the host one to the householder and one to the king. If a weapon was drawn, and no injury was done fines went to the householder and the king By the time of Cnut (1016-1035), hamsocn (the right to receive a fine for housebreaking) was a recognised right of the king both in Wessex and in the Danelaw.
The idea was developing that the king's peace extended beyond the immediate surroundings of his court. The best account of the development has been provided by Sir Frederick Pollock. The king first brought under his protection the locality surrounding his court: in the eleventh century his peace extended within a radius of three miles, three and a bit furlongs of his residence. By the time of William I, the king's peace protected travellers on the four great Roman roads: Watling Street, Erming Street, Hykenild or Icknield Way and Foss Way. Other roads were in the sheriff's peace, but gradually came within the king's peace by the end of the fourteenth century.
Following the Norman Conquest, the "king's peace" had extended to refer to "the normal and general safeguard of public order" in the realm, although specially granted peaces continued to be given after this period. Under the Leges Edwardi Confessoris (Laws of Edward the Confessor), the four great highways of the realm (the Roman roads of Watling Street, Icknield Street, Ermine Street, and Fosse Way) as well as navigable rivers were also under the king's peace. The Leges Edwardi Confessoris provided that the weeks for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost were under the king's peace as well. Maitland commented that the king's peace had begun to "swallow up lesser peaces" such as the peaces of local lords of the manor. For example, roads other than the four great Roman roads were formerly under the sheriffs' peace, but by the end of the 14th century had been brought under the king's peace.
THE KINDS OF PARLIAMENTARY QUARRELS and constitutional debates that five hundred years later would elevate the Leges Edwardi to the status of important evidence of Parliament's continuity beyond the Norman Conquest were far from the mind of its author. Instead, he was driven by powerful memories of the events of the recent past. The better part of a century had passed since Duke William and his invasion fleet had sailed from Saint-Valéry on 27 September 1066, setting out, like Agamemnon (thought the Conqueror's panegyrist, William of Poitiers), "to avenge the insult to his brother's bed."¹ Those had been momentous years. They had seen the protracted conquest of England and settlement of the Conqueror's men- the Normans, Flemings, Bretons, and other allies-on the estates of dead, dispossessed, or outlawed English warriors and lords. They had heard, too often for Norman complacency, of the gathering of Scandinavian invasion fleets much like those that had carried Cnut's conquering army to England in 1016; four times these fleets sailed, though with little lasting effect.
This was a time of rebellions by ambitious English and Norman barons and of wars between members of the royal family itself, intermittently between William II (1087-1100) and Henry I (1100-1135) of England and their brother Robert, duke of Normandy, and more widely between King Stephen and Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and later her son Henry of Anjou, between 1135 and 1154. The chronicles give the impression, perhaps intended, of an England beset by biblical plagues: in 1077, "wild fire came upon many shires and burned down many villages"; five years later a "great famine" struck; four years after that came a cattle plague accompanied by tremendous thunderstorms in which many people died. Some witnessed a man-made plague: the castling of England. Within twenty years of the conquest, over eighty had been built, and, as one of the native chroniclers lamented, "after that it grew much worse." Not all change carried overtones of divine punishment. The population by modern estimates grew at a tremendous rate, and new religious orders were founded on the continent and imported to fill the landscape with monasteries, priories, and cells. Whether violent or peaceful, plague, population, and new neighbors all put a strain on an English society familiar with past invasions but grown accustomed in the last half century to peace and some prosperity. Voices of complaint and praise concerning Norman rule create a cacophony in the sources. Which voices the author of the Leges Edwardi heard would have depended on when he entered the hall and where he sat to listen.
The conquest changed a great deal in English life. William of Poitiers intoned that in 1066 "the blood-stained battleground was covered with the flower of the youth and nobility of England." The defeated were not immediately replaced as a class, but through forfeits, grants, and deaths without heirs, only a few Englishmen remained among the over two hundred major landowners recorded in Domesday Book in 1086. The consequences of this replacement of the highest level of aristocracy in England by William I's followers has been hotly debated by historians for centuries. No consensus has been reached, nor is one likely at any point in the future. Given how little is known about individual postconquest lords, their assumption of their predecessors' rights, or their relationships with their tenants, generalizations about these consequences are difficult to make with any conviction. Nevertheless, some observations can be ventured. The change in the aristocracy meant necessarily a change in aristocratic values, if not in rights and duties. For instance, those nobles who remained, whatever their descent or language, soon conformed to a new code of conduct called "chivalry," which meant that whereas in the past death was likely to follow defeat in war or rebellion, now the vanquished could expect mercy. Some of the broader changes England underwent were not fully grasped in 1100 or even in 1150. The shift of political axis from the North Sea, where England's relations with the Scandinavians had tied it since at least the early eleventh century, to France and then, after the beginning of the crusades, to the Mediterranean, wrought changes too subtle to have been clearly perceptible in a single lifetime.
The fall of the Russian monarchy remains a tragically sad event in the scope of history. With scholarly attention focused on violence, the rise of Bolshevism, and the ensuing Soviet Union, the final tsar fades into the tapestry of Russian history as a tarnished reminder of bloody rebellions, pogroms, and war. As Nicholas II attempted to institute political and social peace within his homeland and Europe, the variegated influences on the tsar reveal themselves through considerate examination of the Russian political situation at both international and domestic levels, the complicated nature of Nicholas II’s personal life and its effect on his public persona, and early twentieth intellectual sources. This paper aims to present the final tsar as a peacemaker through deliberate understanding of his motives and the effects of political, familial, and personal influence upon his public persona and reign. Despite his nickname of Nicholas the Bloody, Nicholas II can be remembered as a surprising innovator for the cause of European peace because of his Disarmament Proposition of 1898 which led to the first Hague Conference and his attempt to prevent World War I with the infamous Willy-Nicky Telegrams.
On August 28, 1898 the world was stunned as it received word of a proposal put forward by the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, through his Foreign Minister, Count Michael Muraviev, to the international community. Popularly known as the Rescript for Peace, in it Nicholas advanced a strident call for an international conference on world peace, clearly indicating his desire "to put aside these incessant armaments and to seek the means of warding off the calamities which are threatening the whole world."
The Rescript begins with a philosophical justification for the call to peace. Muraviev (on behalf of Nicholas) writes: "The maintenance of general peace, and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations, present themselves in the existing condition of the whole world, as the ideal towards which the endeavors of all Governments should be directed." The conviction that peace is the accepted goal of all 'civilized" governments is continuously referred to in the Rescript. "The preservation of peace" and "the desired pacification" is described as the "object of international policy," the purpose of "powerful alliances" and the only acceptable reason for the maintenance of "military forces." According to Nicholas' interpretation of current events, it is precisely because the buildup in armaments no longer serves the goal of peace that it should be halted. In the strongest worded section of the entire Rescript, Nicholas warns: "It appears evident, then, that if this state of things were prolonged, it would inevitably lead to the very cataclysm which it is desired to avert, and the horrors of which make every thinking man shudder in advance."
The maintenance of general peace, and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations, present themselves in the existing condition of the whole world, as the ideal towards which the endeavors of all Governments should be directed.
The humanitarian and magnanimous ideas of His Majesty the Emperor, my August Master, have been won over to this view. In the conviction that this lofty aim is in conformity with the most essential interests and the legitimate views of all Powers, the Imperial Government thinks that the present moment would be very favorable for seeking, by means of international discussion, the most effectual means of insuring to all peoples the benefits of a real and durable peace, and, above all, of putting an end to the progressive development of the present armaments.
In the course of the last twenty years the longings for a general appeasement have become especially pronounced in the consciences of civilized nations. The preservation of peace has been put forward as the object of international policy; in its name great States have concluded between themselves powerful alliances; it is the better to guarantee peace that they have developed, in proportions hitherto unprecedented, their military forces, and still continue to increase them without shrinking from any sacrifice.
All these efforts nevertheless have not yet been able to bring about the beneficent results of the desired pacification. The financial charges following an upward march strike at the public prosperity at its very source.
The intellectual and physical strength of the nations, labor and capital, are for the major part diverted from their natural application, and unproductively consumed. Hundreds of millions are devoted to acquiring terrible engines of destruction, which, though today regarded as the last word of science, are destined tomorrow to lose all value in consequence of some fresh discovery in the same field.
National culture, economic progress, and the production of wealth are either paralyzed or checked in their development. Moreover, in proportion as the armaments of each Power increase, so do they less and less fulfill the object which the Governments have set before themselves.
"War is a necessary part of God's arrangement of the world…Without war the world would deteriorate into materialism." 
