If you looked at today’s NYT crossword puzzle, you saw that one of the clues was “statement that in fact, was not part of the Hippocratic Oath”, and when you looked at 7 letter space (and maybe after you got a few letters from vertical words), you saw that the correct answer was “Do No Harm”.

So, I looked on Wikipedia’s article on the Hippocratic Oath, and saw that – when referring to patients – the Oath includes “……I will do no harm to them.”

What does this mean? That I shouldn’t rely on the NYT crossword puzzle writers for my education, or that I shouldn’t rely on Wikipedia? I think I know the answer.

And, while the Hippocratic Oath may not be a part of our legal system, we know that many doctors treat it seriously, and find that many of new restrictions popping up on abortion treatment do, in their minds, require them to violate their sacred professional oath.

Who else is bound by the adage “Do no harm”? Probably no one, and this is too bad. Wouldn’t it be nice if political leaders had to take such an oath and had somehow to live up to it?

When it comes to, among other things, war, clearly “do no harm” takes a back seat to “destroy the enemy”. I guess there may be no way out of this, but wars usually destroy not only the enemy, but also the victors. And most political leaders don’t have the foresight to see this coming.

Who am I thinking of?

Well, first, look at Vladimir Putin. He truly is engaged in reconstructing part of the Soviet Empire with his invasion of Ukraine, and reconstructing what he believes is Russia’s natural place in the world. He wants to do this Ukraine by taking part of that country and annexing it to his own and having the government of the remaining Ukraine as beholden to, and subservient to, his Russia. He saw Russia losing its power and influence and, yes, only he can fix it.

Putin started this invasion without any provocation from Kiev, just as he had marched into Ukraine seven or so years earlier to occupy the Donbas region and the Crimean peninsula. Through his land invasion, and air strikes, he clearly was not following a “do no harm” ethos. Quite the contrary, harm is what he wanted to create.

The latest statistics that I have seen show that, in doing this, Russia itself has already suffered 100,000 deaths and another 200,000 casualties. These exceed the casualties among Ukrainians. So in undertaking this war, Putin has not even given thought to refraining from doing harm to his own people, his own constituents. He apparently doesn’t care about Russian lives any more than he cares about Ukrainian lives. Or if he does care about either, his care is subordinate to his need to restore Russian glory.

Let’s move to Hamas. Hamas attacks Israel on October 7. The attack was devastating and (maybe) a surprise. It was certainly a surprise to those who felt the brunt of it. The Israeli response was to leash a fierce ground and air war against Hamas and the Gaza Strip. One can criticize the Israeli response (both its immediate response and its continuing response) on any number of levels, to be sure, but that is not my point here.

My point is that Hamas clearly knew there would be a response. And they knew that the response would lead to great harm throughout Gaza, the land that they governed and that, you would think, they would want to protect. But, no. They had a larger purpose – again the restoration of of a grand political dream by taking control of all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, from the river to the sea. (Of course, there is a difference here – the empire Putin wants to resurrect at one time existed; the empire that Hamas wants to create has never existed.)

You often hear that Hamas doesn’t care about the people of Gaza. It’s easy to slough this off (is that the right word?) as Israeli propaganda, but no….it seems to be true. Knowing how strong an Israeli response would be, knowing how much power Israel had and who its allies are, Hamas knew that the effect of the response on Gaza would be horrific. They just didn’t care. (In part this is because their leadership is safe in Qatar and Lebanon.)

So Putin starts a war of aggression that, so far, has resulted in over 300,000 Russian deaths and injuries, and the war is nowhere near over. And Hamas starts, and continues to fight a war, that will result in the total destruction of Gaza, and its leaders have even said that their sea to land goal does not include protecting its citizens. Let the UN do that, they said. (The UN role is keeping the Palestinian situation festering is still another issue.)

Presumably, when the Russia/Ukraine war ends, there situation will be quite clear. There will be a Russia and there will be a Ukraine (the boundaries may or may not change from today’s boundaries), and there will be mechanisms developed that, at least in theory, will hold the peace and allow for rebuilding.

When the current Israel/Hamas war ends (and assuming it does not escalate and spread dramatically), things are much less certain. The parties will continue to hate and fear each other, Gaza will be totally destroyed (physically and economically), and 2,200,000 people in Gaza will look around and say “what next?”, “where’s food?”, “where’s shelter?”, “where’s a job?”, “where are the schools?”, “where are the hospitals”, etc., etc, etc.

Will anyone really care about the Gazans? It doesn’t look like it to me. And, as I have said before, there is barely enough room in Gaza for 2 million, but since half of the 2,000,000 are under 18, we are talking about a population which will soon be 3, then 5, then 8 million. You can’t leave this many people in Gaza, even if there were no restrictions from Israel and Egypt on what can come into the country. There Arab world, and maybe countries beyond the Arab world, will have to open up.

Obviously, I could go on and on. But guess what? No matter how much I write here, we will not get any closer to the answer we are looking for. But of course, it isn’t up to us; it’s up to the “leaders”, whoever they will be, of those two countries (I consider Gaza a country – after all, if it isn’t, what is it?). And those leaders will have a number of goals as they move forward. Sadly, it’s hard to imagine that “do no harm” will be among them.