The year 2014 marks 100 years since the start of World War I. What was supposed to be the war to end all wars turned out to be one of the many bloody conflicts since then. The death count of the past 100 years has been more than that of any other century and our region, for one, continues to be mired in violence.

Pakistan came into existence amidst bloodshed, fought wars with India and became involved in proxy wars, all the while facing internal divisions. September 11 and the wars that it spawned are some of the biggest and bloodiest stories of our times. The Middle East remains a troubled region and Kashmiris continue to suffer under occupation.

The following is a column which is part of Sunday, January 5th's special double issue of Books & Authors - an issue that looks at some of the conflicts that have shaped and are shaping the world we live in, and how Urdu literature has responded to them.

Will peace remain an elusive dream in the Middle East?

The Levant is one of the world’s most blood-drenched lands. It maintained this dubious tradition during the period we are concerned with — post-1945. Away from the Mediterranean coast, Iran and Iraq had their adequate quota of bloodletting in the heart of the Middle East.

A myth surrounding the first Arab-Israeli war (1948-49) is that Israel was able to defeat the combined armies of four Arab states. The truth was no Arab country had a modern army, unlike Israel whose forces had unhindered access to huge arsenals of World War II weapons lying in Europe.

Of the disparity between the two forces, nobody could talk more authoritatively than the commander on the spot, Sir John Bagot Glubb. “I had only some 4,500 men to face a much greater number of Israelis and to defend an area of 3,000 square miles,” says Glubb Pasha in his autobiography, The Changing Scenes of Life. “With a force of 300 we entered Jerusalem ... which contained more than 100,000 Jews.” Egypt, with 20,500 and Syria and Iraq with 3,000 each made an additional force of 26,500. But Syria took no part in fighting, and the Egyptian army was poorly equipped. As against this, Israel had 60,000 well equipped men, including the Jewish Brigade armed and trained by the British during World War II to fight Germans.

In the next war seven years later, Israel had little difficulty in reaching the Suez canal. Gamal Abdel Nasser had shocked Europe by nationalising the waterway. Europe could put up with white dictators, appease them and even collaborate with them. But here was an upstart belonging to an “inferior” race challenging the might of those who had defeated Germany 11 years ago. At Paris, Israeli, French and British diplomats met, and it was decided Israel would have a go at Egypt, and the two colonial powers would move in to “save the canal.” Instead, British planes bombed Egypt, prompting the royal air force to court-martial those pilots who had refused to obey orders.

When Khrushchev threatened to attack Britain and France, Eisenhower refused to stand by them. He was right. The war had nothing to do with Nato. Anthony Eden’s fate was sealed. Israel obeyed the UN to withdraw from the Sinai, but it had learnt a lesson. It would develop a strong lobby in America to ensure no US government would again pressure Israel into obeying the UN.

The 1967 war was a monument to Nasser’s stupidity. His blockade of the Tiran straits became casus belli. Egypt now had modern Soviet arms, but still the Israeli air force wrecked the Egyptian armies in the Sinai, captured Golan Heights from Syria and overran the West Bank. The effects of this war are still with us, with Israel having annexed Jerusalem and Golan Heights.

The Sinai peninsula would still be with Israel, had not Anwar Saadat shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility in Ramazan, 1973. The surprise, daytime attack that breached the Bar Lev line, with 2,000 tanks and half a million men transported across the canal, stunned Israel. On the northern front, Syrians overran the Golan Heights and threatened Galilee settlements. Of the Sinai disaster, Moshe Dayan says in his autobiography, Story of My Life: “Hundreds of mutilated and burnt-out war vehicles lay strewn over the field … I am no novice at war or battle scenes, but I had never seen such a sight … Here was a vast field of slaughter stretching all round as far as the eye could see.” On the second day of the war, Dayan “put Israel’s nuclear forces on alert” (Martin Van Creveld, Moshe Dayan). Ultimately, it was Israel which had the upper hand. But Saadat had won in his aim. He made America and Israel reopen the occupied territories’ issue. Finally, with president Jimmy Carter playing mediator at Camp David (1978), Israel agreed to quit the peninsula in return for recognition by Egypt. For Saadat, this was a military and diplomatic triumph, for which he paid with his life.

Seven years after the Ramazan war, the heart of the Middle East would see three conflicts, the central character being Saddam Hussein. Egged on by America and Saudi Arabia, Saddam attacked Iran on September 22, 1980. Khorramshahr fell, only to be retaken by Iran, which used its revolutionary fervour to mobilise people, including child soldiers, 50,000 of whom fell. Recognised as the 20th century’s longest conventional war, it produced no lasting results. Casualty figures remain shrouded in mystery, but on the whole there were a million civilian and military dead. A ceasefire was effected on August 20, 1988, and a peace treaty signed in 1991, when Saddam agreed to Iran’s sovereignty on Shatt el-Arab’s eastern side. The next war testified to Saddam’s brainlessness. In August 1990 he attacked the ‘Iraqi province of Kuwait’ only to be punished by a US-led coalition. Thirteen years later he would be punished again — but for no fault of his. UN verification commissioner Hans Blix told the world body he found no “smoking gun” (weapons of mass destruction). America and Britain still chose to attack Iraq in March 2003 and saw to it that Saddam was hanged.

Meanwhile, as the Iran-Iraq war raged, Israel invaded Lebanon on October 6, 1982, with fierce naval and air bombardment at dawn on Beirut. It was a move to expel Palestinian freedom fighters from Lebanon. With their faces covered, Palestinian guerillas, including Yasser Arafat, quit Lebanon — only to return a few months later. Israel withdrew except for a self-declared security zone in the south, which it quit 18 years later after Hezbollah proved its tenacity. The war would be remembered by generations of Arabs for the Sabra-Chatilla slaughter. The act of genocide was carried out by the Phalangist militia with the approval of the man later to be known as Butcher of Beirut — Ariel Sharon. In July 2006, Israel again attacked Lebanon, with its air force concentrating on destroying the country’s infrastructure. Approximately 1,300 civilians were killed and a million displaced. The real resistance came from Lebanese militias, led by Hezbollah, whose Iran-supplied rockets for the first time hit Haifa. Israel suffered 165 dead, and the war established Hezbollah as a fighting force. The 21st century has also seen periodic Israeli attacks on Gaza, the most ferocious being the three-week offensive in December-January 2008-09. Israel targeted not only Hamas’s military centres, it punished the Palestinian people, bombed a mosque and a school and used phosphorus artillery shells against Gazan civilians, 1,417 of whom were killed. Israel lost 13 men.

The conflict in Syria falls in a different category. Technically, no state is at war with Syria. But half a dozen militias and many states — Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — are fighting a proxy war, with total casualties having crossed 100,000. The UN made Syria’s Baathist President, Bashar al-Assad, surrender his chemical weapons. But the slaughter continues.

Peace in the Middle East will be elusive so long as Israel doesn’t vacate the occupied territories, and the House of Islam doesn’t reorganise itself on democratic and scientific lines.

The writer is a Dawn staffer