In Ukraine you are not fighting for me, you do not protect my values, actually you kick my values with your boots.

In Israel you are not fighting to protect me and my values, actually you drown them in blood and destruction.

You are not fighting for me. Stop pretending.

You are fighting for yourself, based on your own values and for your own gain. There is no good and compelling reason to destroy and kill. There is no compelling reason for war. No compelling reason with one exception and that is if you have to save your own life. And so you say that you do fight for your life and with this you put those who really have to fight for their life to shame. The soldiers in the war zone, yes, they do, but not you, the leaders who order them to fight. Not you the followers who applaud the leaders and not you the benefactors who give a platform to leaders and who send money and arms to the leaders. You do not fight for anybody’s life. You destroy life. 

Then you also all say that you are fighting in self defence, and that you have a right to self defence and self determination. And you are saying send us money, send us weapons, send us all the support you can so that we can defend ourselves and our values… but you do not add “for our aims and our plans, for our goods, our influence, our power, our profit” you say you do it  “… because we are fighting for you.”

No, you are not fighting for me. Stop pretending.

And no, you are not fighting to save your lives. It is not a fight for a life against another life. Stop repeating this…. With exception of the soldiers you send out to kill and to destroy. Of course every killed soldier and every killed civilian is a tragedy and it is always one too many. However, whether in Ukraine or in Israel, the “enemy” whichever way it is described and defined – and from whatever side of the battles you are looking at it – the enemy does not plan to take everybody’s life. 

Of course you want to rule your country as you see fit. And you do not want outside interference – except to send you weapons, arms, money and every support that you need… 

Let us look at it from an outside, non-partisan angle:  In one case the ruling elite of one country wants to replace the ruling elite of another country. As a whole, or at least in parts of the country; in the other case the ruling elite of one group of people in a “region” (for a better word) wants to have a country of its own to rule and the ruling elite of the (stronger) group of people there does not want to allow that (and has not allowed it for decades).

Billions of euros and dollars have already been spent, goods worth billions have been destroyed, lives have been ended or mutilated, people have been forced to run away, people are forced or “persuaded” to risk their lives (“we need more soldiers…”, no man between 18 and 60 is allowed to leave the country…), millions of people are suffering from the consequences of the conflicts… conflicts that could have been solved already by negotiations, and will have to be solved by negotiations between the warring parties anyway. With the help of outside parties. 

These outside parties have up to now decided to either stay silent or, in many cases such as the EU and the US, to draw benefit from these conflicts for their own agendas: financial and  geopolitical. Power and influence. Selling these efforts to us, the people, as necessary support for a just fight, to support countries and people who after all fight for freedom, for the right to self determination, for us and our values and our well-being and freedom… Sorry, I have not seen that the profit drawn from this war has reached the man and the woman in the streets of Western Europe. It lands somewhere, for sure, but not in our pockets.

No, you are not doing this for me either. Stop pretending. 

If these outside parties were to use their influence to force the warring parties to the negotiation table – a thing they can do if they use all their influence – these conflicts would have been solved a long time ago. Do not tell me that this cannot be done. Of course it can be done. History is full of the power of persuasion of stronger parties. But somehow it seems that letting these wars run their course is serving some certain aims and certain pockets in the true sense of the word. 

The old question “Cui bono?” – and its opposite “Cui malo?” – come to mind. Asking these questions, and trying to reply to them might help understand why the wars are still ongoing. And no, it is not because you have monsters who are so evil that they just want to kill everybody everywhere. Evil people exist, certainly, but they are not the ones who let the wars and the destruction continue its course. The ones who could stop the fighting and destruction do not do it  – and they have their own reasons for it. And these reasons most often revolve around money, influence, power, geopolitical stratagems, and the like.

We, the common people, are fed the stories and narratives of freedom, values, protection, self-defence, or heroism and enemy-brutality which needs to be fought. Stories where atrocities committed by one side are taken as justification to commit similar atrocities oneself. 

There is a lot of bitter irony in the fact that the religions all these parties relate to, be it Judaism, Christianity or Islam most of the time do preach the contrary (although they all have their cruel parts or brutal revanchism too). 

The societies we live in say that they value peace, understanding, rule of law, human rights, … however, when an enemy breaches these values then we feel that we have the right to do the same and ignore the values, become beasts ourselves, again. Is this the civilised world?

Decades of peace education, education for human rights and for democracy, for anti-discrimination, for independent and critical thinking, … something has gone really wrong! Decades of lip service to these values and guiding principles yes, but little real education and character formation. Otherwise people would say with me

“Stop pretending you are doing this for me!”

And please, stop repeating that all you do is only to secure peace and prosperity, human rights, diversity, equality and democracy. Because if these were your driving principles and driving force you would do everything to bring the warring parties to the negotiation table – you would have done it right from the start – and you would stop financing the wars, the killing and the destruction and you would stop sending arms and other military support to the warring parties.