We are at an impasse, as ongoing territorial disputes internationally show history brazenly repeating itself.
We watched in horrified surprise as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, despite escalating tensions from the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Russian militarisation on the Ukrainian border from 2021. Similarly, the strike on Gaza comes after a decades-long crescendo. In the early 1990s, Samuel Huntington argued that wars would increasingly be fought between cultural and religious identities rather than nations. Now, the global tilt towards populism has made the idea of nation inextricable from culture, to the extent that differing countries feel it impossible to coexist.
But as all eyes focus on the Middle East, other international affairs become blurred. Western media primarily covers issues which affect their oil or gas supply, and allies are chosen based on shared political ideology. Joe Biden, who mis-informedly equates Hamas with Vladimir Putin, also said in a press conference in 2013 that “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved”.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli siege on Gaza are fundamentally different in motive, strategy, and execution. The political outcomes will also be different: Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule gives him terrifyingly free reign, while as Israel is a democracy, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be held accountable to a population whose discontent preceded the Hamas attack.
In 1982, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its siege on Beirut was condemned by President Ronald Reagan as a “holocaust.” Then-prime minister of Israel Menachem Begin was forced to resign shortly after. Today’s air strikes on Gaza have similarly shocked global opinion and teeter on the boundary between retaliation and international law violations. Netanyahu will eventually face the consequences in the next election, the first since 2006.
However, a comparison must be made between the international media coverage of Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza/Palestine. News channels are dominated by coverage of the two conflicts – understandably so considering the scale of the humanitarian disaster. But as the world focusses on these territorial disputes, regimes in smaller countries have been emboldened to follow suit. And we simply lack the bandwidth to pay attention.
Consider the Caucasus. The Nagorno-Karabakh region is a disputed territory, home to a substantial ethnic Armenian population despite Azerbaijani claims to the land. Azerbaijan has been blockading the Nagorno-Karabakh region for the last year, a boa constrictor on supplies. Tensions reached a high point when, in September this year, Azerbaijan launched an offensive, expelling the entire ethnic Armenian population in what they recognise as genocide. It was more than a regional squabble, particularly when Armenia turned to the West for aid after over a century of Russian backing. But Biden’s feeble response was to send a mere 100 American soldiers to train Armenian troops.
Now the world is a canvas of forgotten conflicts. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, appears to be stuck in a cycle of violent insurgency, and amidst a cluster of military coups, the government in Kinshasa is looking to expel or exterminate a whole section of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s ethnic Tutsi citizenry. Contextually, the Kinshasa ideology is imported from the defeated genocidal regime in Rwanda. With more than 8,000 forced to leave their homes every day since 1 October, the country has only received $818 million of the $2.3 billion needed. (Bear in mind that the American emergency funding request reportedly totals around $60 billion for Ukraine and $10 billion for Israel.)
In this climate, Taiwan is being watched with bated breath. But we must ensure that the next big territorial grab does not absorb all of our attention and resources. With distant conflicts, all that we have agency over is how we interact with content fed to us. The modern news cycle is frenzied and polarised, exacerbated by social media where misinformation is kindled by insufficient content moderation. As consumers, we are gasoline: blindly reposting for the sake of being provocative makes a fireball of a candle.
Despite catastrophic failures of Western military intervention in the Middle East in recent memory, avarice, militarism, and diplomatic hubris will never stop politicians from deciding the issues of the day. The difference today is the collective public horror at violations of international humanitarian law, with a trove of accessible evidence. Yet our altruism must be non-exclusive. Politicians say what we want to hear – we must want to hear more.
“Armored Corps in the Gaza Strip” by Israel Defense Forces is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.