(s.m.) Published as received. The author of the note, Pietro De Marco, age 84, scholar of philosophy, theology, and history, taught sociology of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy.
In the photo from the Associated Press, Tehran under the Israeli bombs.
*
The Holy See and the Juncture in the Middle East
by Pietro De Marco
1. Mediations and arbitrations
The suspension of wars underway does not come through the activation of classic arbitration. In fact, none of the cases of warfare from Ukraine to the two Near Eastern fronts (Israel-Hamas, Israel-Iran) is a matter of war declared and meant as the “political solution by other means” of a dispute, but of war for values, which aim for the destruction of a moral and cultural enemy, or “asymmetric” war of a new type, provoked and conducted by multiple subjects and with a variety of tactics, by definition undeclared.
In the Russian-Ukrainian case, the ideal character and values invoked by Putin are fictitious, mere propaganda, and the “casus belli” specious, but nooses remain around the necks of those who initiated the aggression.
In the Middle Eastern theater, the aggressive actors, and as a result those who react to and oppose them (Israel, in part the U.S.), place themselves from the outset – that is, in the daily reality of hybrid wars – outside the decision-making authority of international bodies and of international law itself.
The latter, then, is an order without coercive power, and cannot have it except in controversial and ineffective ways. Only a global “dominus,” sole wielder of legitimate coercion, could judge and sanction, and therefore perhaps prevent, a conflict between sides and between states. But it would first have to pass over the bodies of all competitors to the sovereign function. More dystopia than utopia.
So, in fact, we have hybrid wars of the “revolutionary war” type. Hybrid wars are well studied, and would not be difficult to identify, but democratic public opinion, led to deny that the West has enemies, still reacts by deprecating the mere will to power of those who oppose them. So among the jurists.
One feature of hybrid wars of long sedimentation is their dimension of widespread indoctrination of the human group to be “liberated,” that is, to be used as the sacrificial ranks when the time comes for weapons. The indoctrination is in fact the manipulation of the fantasy worlds of individuals, populating them with moral enemies to be hated and tomorrow eliminated. A young participant in the raid of October 7 telephoned his parents, proudly, saying: “Think about it! I’ve killed a good ten Jews!”
Thus, in a declared manner, in the project of Shiite hegemony in the Middle East, Israel is first and foremost “inimicus” (the moral enemy) not “hostis” (the enemy on the battlefield, the adversary), to adopt a classic and indispensable distinction. “Inimicus” which also becomes “hostis” in armed conflict, making some observers forget that, in these atypical wars, hostilities are the contingent emergency of a war conducted between two sides, for some time, in other forms.
In short, the wars of these last few years, or days, also show what a “revolutionary” hybrid war is. Paradoxically, the peacemaker who managed to get the Israeli army to withdraw from Gaza would have to continue in turn (and how?) in the liquidation of the insurgent militias, or there would be no peace. Hybrid war is the constant condition of southern Lebanon, which public opinion sees only when the Israeli tanks move.
It is therefore difficult to act as arbitrators between hatreds and other cultural impulses that are non-negotiable, or negotiable and surmountable only between individuals (the individual Jew, the individual Palestinian, the individual Iranian, etc.). Of course, on the Iranian front, there could be negotiation over international monitoring of the uranium and plutonium enrichment sites, constant and without obstacles. But, with the current ruling class of Iran still in place, this is negotiating the impossible. If it were then a question of imposed external control, as it will have to be in the end, this would mean placing under international protection an area (nuclear material and armaments) of Iranian national sovereignty. This necessary “vulnus” of sovereignty would then fall within the area of cogent preventive interventions, under the jurisdiction of the UN. But the slowness and partiality of the UN – on account of which it could be said that the UN itself has for decades participated in a hybrid war against Israel – makes the international organization unreliable, incapable of effective preventive measures, as happened with the alleged containment of Hezbollah in lower Lebanon.
All this imposes on the Jewish state a decisive autonomy of action. Once the certainty and imminence of the risk is given, this autonomy legitimately exercises the preventive response. Also in the case of Gaza, it can be argued that the continuation of the war, after the first retaliatory response to the raid of October 7, should be considered legitimate prevention of any similar future aggression.
There is a heated debate about the legality of Israel’s war, especially the one it has opened against Iran, and about its political foresight, on the two open fronts that are in reality strategically a single front. Let us see.
According to current doctrine, preventive war as such presupposes that “there can be no reinstatement of law [in the international framework] through a regular process”. But this conviction and its consequences establish as legitimate an anti-juridical or pre-juridical situation (Kant’s “state of nature”), legalizing in fact what is “ex lege”. Yet there are borderline situations that the law universally recognizes and does not abandon to the “state of nature,” but rather regulates: every emergency, and the entire law of war. The statement that one cannot simultaneously be in favor of preventive war and democratic in the international order does not take into account the state of necessity.
The destructive action of an imminent danger does not and cannot have an “exit strategy” in itself. What is urgent is the annihilation of the danger itself, or rather of the enemy as such. When a hybrid war emerges as active combat, the definition of war fully fits it. The elaboration of the aftermath is a political task. The work of international organizations and political bodies should focus on this, rather than on the course of the war, which has its own logic. But since it is assumed that nothing political is happening in Gaza, but only a humanitarian tragedy, no one is seriously working on the aftermath.
2. What diplomatic activity of the Holy See?
In this context, what public judgment and what action can be expected from the Holy See? I say first of all “Holy See” because an action with decidedly personalistic modalities (to the detriment of the secretariat of state and other bodies) like that exercised by Pope Francis was not and is not destined to have effects. To be ended, wars do not require an additional “authoritative voice” that preaches peace, because there are no performative enunciations without realities, forces, suitable to realize them. To be stopped, wars require real removals of their causes, at least of a necessary and sufficient share of these.
For the Holy See, if a wise silence is not chosen, the public formulation of a “complete” judgment would be salient. To make myself clear: I would consider, for example, incomplete and ultimately erroneous any “humanitarian” formulation on Gaza that did not explicitly designate Hamas as daily sharing responsibility – and primary responsibility – for the current suffering of the Palestinian population.
As for the Israeli-Iranian conflict, a “complete” judgment, even in the language of diplomacy, was perhaps glimpsed in the Jubilee audience of last June 14, in which Leo XIV declared, with the brevity that is typical of him and that we so much hoped for, that it is not lawful between peoples to attack the other’s existence. In the appeal, which was interspersed with the last greetings to groups of pilgrims, he said: “No one should ever threaten the existence of the other. It is the duty of all countries to support the cause of peace […] by promoting solutions that guarantee security and dignity for all.”
With a few more words, potentially, the Holy See could unequivocally associate that statement with the growing Iranian practice of hybrid warfare against Israel (and indirectly against Arab countries) over the last twenty years. Taking a stand against, even if only in terms of principle, gives strength and not weakness to the third party, in this case to a pope, who does not present himself as an enemy but who equally shows that he possesses criteria for judgment.
A German expert on the Middle East would have objected to the observation made by Chancellor Merz (“Israel operates in place of and to the advantage of a helpless West”) that, at this moment, it is not the Iranian regime that is threatening but the Iranian citizens who are threatened. I have already had occasion to write that the contemporary Western intellect, the average intellect, is in the grip of a syndrome that makes it incapable of distinguishing the empathic moment from the rational-analytic one and that, in any case, it unwisely privileges the former. Complicit in this is a philosophical “koinè” from the drawing room that for decades has privileged “feeling.”
How else could the compassionate “feeling” suddenly erase from minds the framework of relations between powers, the instances of destruction between civilizations, the concrete irreducibility of war to the pity of spectators? And this same “feeling” irrationally also commands, every day, many amateur appeals to international or humanitarian law; irrationally not because the appeal to law is not rational, but because it cannot be thought of as the recourse to apotropaic formulas. It deceives and is useless.
May the Holy See recover its age-old rationality and Catholic compassion.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
————
Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.