Author and Middle East correspondent, Charles Glass, writes about the current conflict in Lebanon:
I hear and sometimes see this war, but I’m not covering it. What good would it do? You, dear reader, don’t give a damn. Nor do the Israeli invaders, their American enablers or Hizbullah’s aspiring martyrs. ...Would anything I write compel the arms dealers and ultra-high-tech digital warfare providers to deprive their managers and shareholders of the profits accruing from their wizard new methods of taking human life? Like the rest of Lebanon, I wake in the night at the sound of every loud bang, unsure whether it is thunder, an Israeli naval shell, a drone explosion or a jet dropping a two-thousand-pound bomb to destroy an entire city block. Diary: Beirut, now and then, Charles Glass, 'London Review of Books', 23 April 2026
It's a sad fact that writing about conflicts, and even showing gruesome videos, does little to stop them. Such documentation cannot oppose the formidable coalition of 'warfare providers' on the other side: the arms merchants, the ideologues, the religious zealots and all their corrupt or gullible hangers-on. Most of us don't want any of that. But the politicians' relentless focus on the short term means that ceasefires and truces are merely pauses in the action that allow parties to stoke resentments and re-arm. A lasting peace is more likely to be a just peace, and we need to create a constituency that is rewarded for achieving it.
World Peace Bonds, or a variant of more modest focus, could be the solution. They would reward a sustained absence of conflict: I suggest a minimum period of thirty years. This long-term focus would encourage investors in the bonds to research, experiment and refine approaches to ending conflict. Such activities would probably include sparing the next generation the neuroses and resentments of their parents - something that good people are doing nowadays (see here, for example), but with a pitifully limited command of resources. A bond regime would channel funding and expertise into the most promising of these activities. If financed by philanthropists, with contributions from NGOs and the public, it could bypass politicians whose narrow short-termism does much to keep conflict going.
World peace is an ambitious goal, about which I have written here, with my book on the subject available here (downloads are free of charge). More modest goals about which I have also written include Middle East Peace Bonds and Nuclear Peace Bonds.
