As Gaza war rages on, Machiavelli would’ve warned Netanyahu. Enemies can learn from warfare

Machiavelli might have also counselled the Israeli PM not to be too eager in his grasp of total victory. Triumph, he might have said, can be almost as dangerous as defeat.

Palestinians shop in an open-air market near the ruins of houses and buildings destroyed in Israeli strikes during the temporary truce between Hamas and Israel | Representational image | Reuters

Every man, but one, was put to the sword. “The most atrocious sort of cruelty occurred,” recorded the chronicler Bernardo Rucellai: “babies ripped from the breasts of their parents and taken into slavery, parents killed under the eyes of their sons, wretched mothers dragged from the last embrace of their children, with silent sadness in the useless wait to be able to welcome the last breath, nuns terrorised and chased from their sanctuaries and slaughtered before their venerated saints.”

The eleventh-century fortress of Monte San Giovanni—sometimes summer home to Pope Adrian IV, retreat for the poet Vittoria Colonna, and prison for the Saint Thomas Aquinas—was battered into submission by French guns inside less than eight hours one day in 1495.  The images, if not the events, are familiar in a world which has seen the horrors unleashed by Hamas’ attack on Israel.

The fall of  Monte San Giovanni marked the spectacular rise of gunpowder warfare in Europe. From the middle of the Age of Enlightenment, the new technology enabled the calculated use of large-scale terror against civilians and embedded itself in warfare for centuries to come.

As the world contemplates the ruinous failure of international institutions to temper the killing in Gaza—a United Nations Security Council vote failed 13-1 this weekend, because of the veto by the United States—one thing is clear. The foundational legal principles that govern modern warfare—centred around the the protection of civilians—have spectacularly failed. Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, says the scale of civilian deaths is “unparalleled and unprecedented”.

To the philosopher of Europe’s gunpowder wars, Niccolo Machiavelli, this would not have been a surprise. Two World Wars, and the savage Cold War carnage which followed them, have not civilised war because the only restraints on states are their means, and those of their adversaries.

But Machiavelli might have also counselled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to be too eager in his grasp of total victory. Triumph, he might have said, can be almost as dangerous as defeat.

God’s unhelpful laws

For contemporaries, it was clear gunpowder marked the coming of a new kind of war. Florentine aristocrat Francesco Guicciardini recorded this extraordinary lament to the languid, less-lethal era of war practised before 1495: “When war did break out,” he claimed “the sides were so evenly balanced, the methods of warfare so slow, and the artillery so inefficient that it took nearly a whole summer to take a castle. Wars were very long, and battles ended with few or no deaths. The French invasion, like a sudden storm, turned everything topsy-turvy.”

Like our own times, Renaissance armies were bound by codes of war. Following the work of the theologian Augustine of Hippo, the church had an ideological framework for just war, involving authority and moral cause. French and Italian soldiers were, alike, pardoned by the church for the sins they would commit, and took vows committing them to the protection of women.

Laws in the medieval period recognised four district levels of conflict, ranging from states of truce to fighting where it was legitimate to wound or kill adversaries—but not burn property. The highest of these, mortal combat, permitted indiscriminate slaughter and loot, and was sometimes signalled by carrying a red flag into battle.

Thirteenth-century medieval legal texts, like De Treuga Et Pace, sought to address this kind of slaughter, providing explicit protections to women, as well as clerics, monks, friars, pilgrims, travellers, merchants, and peasants, James Johnson records.

For all the injunctions, Enlightenment Italy remained an extraordinarily dangerous place for civilians caught up in wars. There are frequent accounts in chronicles of women raped in their homes, and nuns assaulted in convents. Guicciardini reported that victims were sold in Rome—some to Italians themselves.

The use of atrocity was not accidental. It proved to cities the certain consequences of resistance, and weakened the will of other defenders. To soldiers themselves, it is possible orgiastic violence offered some form of psychological relief from combat that was becoming ever-more impersonal, brutal and squalid.

The philosophy of killing

As a diplomat of the Florentine republic between 1498 and 1512, the philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli found himself drawn into a complex maze of negotiations to defend his republic, involving France, Germany and the Papacy. Like his friend Guicciardini, Machiavelli found himself succumbing to the notion that war had been less savage before the French invasions across the mountains. The philosopher, however, also asked searching questions about just why inter-state conflict had become as unrestrained as they had.

To Machiavelli, it appeared that conventional thinking stood the truth on its head: in fact, war was the natural state of things, not peace. Even in times where armies were not besieging cities, Machiavelli noted bleakly in his book Tercets on Ambition, human nature was driven by the Furies called Avarice and Ambition, with their attendant companions Envy, Sloth, Hatred, Cruelty, Pride, and Deceit.

For the philosopher, the answer lay in the development of nation-states which invested in their security. Long periods of peace, he argued, softened republics, and made them unfit to resist the snares of their opponents. To this problem, Machiavelli added religion. The power of divine cults, he argued, undermined the need to regulate states through systems of law, in turn defended by the use of coercive force.

Even though Italy’s republics used mercenary forces, he went on, enabling a class of soldiers who survived by sacking and looting the enemy undermined the state. It created parallel centres of power, and forced Princes to excessively tax the population to maintain their mercenary forces.

This is not to suggest that Machiavelli thought the indiscriminate use of coercion would secure the state. The case of Volterra, which rebelled over revenues from its alum mines, makes clear he understood the dangers of acquiring states by force. Had Florence received Volterra by negotiated accord, he writes, “you would have had advantage and security from it; but since you have to hold it by force, in adverse times it will bring you weakness and trouble and in peaceful times, loss and expense.”

The lessons of wars

Ever since the end of the Second World War, millions have died in conditions regulated by international humanitarian law. “The ‘police actions’, ‘interventions’, and wars of ‘self-defence’ waged under these conditions since 1945 have been justified by a sense of moral superiority and consequentialist arguments which would have been familiar to medieval clerics,” historian Stephen Bowd has argued in a superb book on the savagery of the Renaissance wars.

The war in Gaza—coming on the back of slaughter in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria—is a repudiation of the hopeful pieties of international institutions and advocates of the humanitarian regulation of the use of force. This is precisely what Niccolo Machiavelli would have anticipated.

Likely, however, Machiavelli would also have held out some words of caution. The overwhelming Israeli military victories up to 1973, he would have pointed out, made its dependence on power excessive. Enemies learn from warfare, too. Lebanon’s Hizbullah drew Israel into a trap in 1982, and the country never quite found a means to address the popular uprisings which later erupted in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel deluded itself it could deter Hamas attacks, even in the face of compelling evidence.

The second important lesson Machiavelli would have pointed out is that war-making is not the ends of a nation-state. As he noted, war-making enriches enclaves of society, forces severe taxation of citizens, and thus ultimately undermines the authority and power of the State. The point of force is to deter, not to punish.

Like Florence on the eve of the gunpowder wars, the world is entering an age of profound uncertainty and conflict, driven by changes in the influence of great powers and new technologies of destruction. The search for decisive victories must give way to the imperfect pause, the tenuous truce, and the treacherous treaty.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)