by Jim Rose in laws of war, Murray Rothbard, war and peace Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, irredentism, Murray Rothbard, revanchism, warmongering

Why are borders in 1861, 1919, 1945, 1948, 1956 or 1967 or any other time morally superior?

Palestinian revanchism is a recipe for endless wars. Revanchism is the desire to reverse territorial losses.

Revanchism is linked with irredentism, the conception that a part of the cultural and ethnic nation remains “unredeemed” outside the borders of its appropriate nation-state.

• A return of German revanchism would plunge Europe back into war as Germany marched to reclaim Western Poland and the Sudetenland lost after the massive ethic cleansing in 1945 and the moving of Poland 1/3rd to the left after Potsdam.

• The Balkans and Eastern Europe would be plunged into war to revise the 1945 and the 1919 boundaries.

• Irish revanchism and irredentism over protestant Northern Ireland led to war from 1922 onwards.

The just war doctrine of the Catholic Church found in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is a convenient summary as any on what is and is not a just war, lists four strict conditions for legitimate defence by military force:

the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

there must be serious prospects of success;

the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition).

Hamas does not have any serious prospects of success in its attacks on Israel. Therefore any military action by Hamas is an unjust war