Peace Means Embracing What We Fear

 By Robert C. Koehler

“In the midst of our grief and pain, let’s remind each other who we are.” .

These are the words of Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She goes on:

“We are people committed to tikkun olam, the repairing of the world. The Israeli government and U.S. government are justifying massive atrocities, tearing this world further apart, and doing so in the names of us and our beloved families. When we say never again, it includes Palestinians, and it means right now.”

Peace or war? Murder or compassion? The hell in Israel and Palestine these last few weeks is the planet’s latest focal point of self-annihilation, which always begins with the dehumanization of enemies. And as Fox points out, this can lead to . . . holocaust: “the unthinkable becomes acceptable when we deny people their humanity.”

And yes, most of the world knows this. But the more power one has — by which I mean military and political — the easier it becomes to stop knowing this. Power, I fear, does far more than “corrupt.” It takes away one’s sanity. Or at least it can.

There have also — over the decades, over the centuries — been, as Jeffrey Sachs points out, “brave leaders” who have pushed for nonviolent change in the world: Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, Mahatma Gandhi, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. They were all assassinated.

And this, of course, feeds the global skepticism: War will never end, so we have no choice: We have to stay prepared for it. And when we’re “prepared,” we also, inevitably, wage it. Because war equals mass murder, the need to justify it — to turn it into an abstract necessity rather than, oh, the slaughter of civilians, the slaughter of children — becomes intense, and justification secures war’s inevitability. And this makes political leadership so much simpler. When we’re always right — when the enemy isn’t just “wrong” but evil — we have no choice but to kill our way to dominance. It doesn’t matter how much blood we shed. Their blood doesn’t matter; it isn’t even real.

Thus, as Jake Johnson writes