How 20th-century laws of war apply amid 21st-century crises

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already aware that Monitor writers around the world strive not just to report the news but also to convey the human stories underneath – and the human values that so often animate them.

Now, however, two major international crises – the war in Gaza, and a surge in migrants from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia desperately trying to enter Europe – are underscoring what might be called a values paradox.

On the one hand, the humanitarian standards enshrined in two key international conventions after World War II have rarely seemed more relevant: the laws of war U.S. President Joe Biden has repeatedly cited in the conflict in Gaza, and the rules protecting refugees in search of asylum.

Yet applying these decades-old commitments to the dramatically altered conditions of our 21st-century world is proving ever more complex and difficult.

The waging of war and the worldwide flow of refugees look almost unrecognizable from when the Geneva Conventions on protecting civilians in conflict were drafted in 1949, and when the United Nations Refugee Convention came into being two years later.

The prospect of bringing the world together to update them looks almost fanciful in today’s geopolitical climate. It’s marked by growing great-power tensions and a Global South increasingly determined to make its independent voice heard, while many democracies are increasingly preoccupied with angry political divisions at home.

Still, the human toll on both sides of the Israel-Hamas war and the plight of the refugees often risking their lives to cross the sea and land borders into Europe have refocused attention on those bedrock postwar conventions.

And while the war in Gaza seems far from over, the humanitarian truce of recent days could turn out to provide a broader model for at least starting to resolve the values paradox.

The key in Gaza has been a coming together of the most directly affected parties, each with its own interests, to focus on the principle at the heart of both post-World War II conventions: a duty to protect vulnerable civilians endangered by circumstances beyond their control.

The negotiators have set aside, at least for as long as the guns and rockets stay silent, the far thornier question of how to apply the laws of war to a conflict very different from the country-versus-country conflicts that prompted the Geneva Conventions.

The war in Gaza pits a national army against a guerrilla force that has embedded its command posts, arms, ammunition, and rockets in civilian areas and a maze of tunnels underneath.

On Oct. 7, Hamas abused, abducted, and killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. The Israelis, too, are facing accusations of war crimes in their bombardment and invasion of northern Gaza. Yet they maintain they’ve done all they can to get civilians to leave those areas, and that there’s no way of hobbling Hamas’ forces militarily without going after them where they are.

What is beyond dispute, however, is the civilian suffering on both sides. 

That’s what led to the truce. It also explains reported U.S. moves to press Israel to adopt a more “targeted” approach if, as is expected, the fighting resumes.

The migrant influx

The “migrant crisis” confronting European governments is, in some ways, similar.

It, too, is nothing like the flow of asylum-seekers that led to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, which sought to open doors for hundreds of thousands of Europeans left uprooted, fearful, and homeless in the wake of the world war. 

Now, the numbers are far higher. The catalysts are more complex. Some migrants are escaping the ravages of war; others are escaping religious or political persecution. Many are fleeing countries blighted economically by a combination of failed governance and the effects of climate change.

And there’s another critical difference. They’re clients – and victims – of what has become nothing short of an international industry: people trafficking.

Just as Israel bridles at accusations that it’s violating laws of war designed for a different kind of conflict than its battle with Hamas, European leaders are frustrated by the provisions of a 1950s refugee convention requiring a fair hearing, support, and care for those asylum applicants who do succeed in crossing their borders.

With once-fringe parties now making major gains on an anti-immigration message, European governments are looking to a combination of more stringent border controls and financial deals with countries along the migration routes simply to keep potential asylum-seekers out.

So will the “Gaza model” work here as well, forged by the countries most directly affected?

If so, it may begin to become clearer in the months ahead, as the European Union finalizes its first unionwide agreement on migration and asylum.

The agreement still has to go through debate, discussion, and potential changes in the European Parliament. But so far it seems to be shaping up as a mix of carrots and sticks: tougher border policies, better processing of those arriving, and quicker deportation for those not accepted, but also measures to ensure better settlement and support for those who are admitted. The hope is for all member states either to accept the migrants or to contribute financially to those settling elsewhere.

Yet with millions of migrants still on the move, the people traffickers thriving, and the political mood on migration toughening in many EU states, human rights groups have said the key test will be whether the EU’s emphasis on deterring, blocking, and returning migrants crowds out provisions to improve settlement and support.

In other words, whether, as in Gaza, the arrangement recognizes the enduring power of the core principle of both humanitarian covenants of 70 years ago – the need to protect fellow human beings unable to protect themselves.