SEEKING A LASTING PEACE

Have they suffered enough?

Jerusalem. The Old City is home to many sites of seminal religious importance for the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Image by AVRAHAM GRAICER. This file, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Jerusalem, the “city of peace” located in Palestine. I refer to Palestine in the traditional sense that includes people living from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and from Lebanon to Egypt. Anyone who has visited Palestine, open eyed, can construe that “city of peace” moniker to be aspirational, as I did over 25 years ago.

We can draw comfort, amidst the confusion since October 7 of this year, that there are clear-thinking columnists and journalists. Writers such as the author of the N Y Times piece on which I base this post. We can draw comfort because they can examine the horrors over the past several weeks with cool analytical eyes and keen insight.

I did not endorse either side of this Israel-Gaza conflict, even as I was emotionally impacted by the actions of October 7. I have ties to all those people and can understand the drivers to their sentiments. These emotions have been forged over centuries of conflict since Biblical times.

To me the continuing conflict in Palestine is a family conflict. Those kinds of conflicts can be at times the most painful and intractable to resolve. The many peoples in Palestine are intertwined culturally, ethnically, spiritually, and emotionally, and have inflicted much harm on each other over the years. Many of those residents have daily interactions and interdependencies. Many of them share hopes for peace as they try to raise families in a healthful and safe environment. In fact, in the current crisis, they have helped each other to survive the attacks from the extremists from Gaza and Israel.

I strongly agree with the author of the New York Times Opinion piece below that the focus must be in the present. A focus to heal, reconstruct lives and infrastructure. A focus on imaginative dreams on how a shared living space can accommodate everyone’s aspirations for safety, peace, and a hopeful future. Given the long history of animosity, keeping score, looking back, and seeking revenge will be catastrophic, prolong the pain and suffering and return conflicted parties to another cycle of horror. This time calls for creativity.

There is no uniformity of outlook among the conflicted parties. Some want peace. Some want unity. Some want restoration of lands that were always conquered from someone else in recent as well as a distant past. Whether the road to peace is through a single or a two-state solution is for those who have suffered so much to decide in constructive dialogue.

To improve conditions, allegiance needs to be to universal principles of human compassion for the other. This could be an opportunity for the world to witness how peoples ferociously aggressive towards each other can accommodate each other’s aspirations and forge a viable path to lasting peace. It will take fearless thinking beyond religion, myths, ethnicities, and feelings of insecurity. Through this latest emergency we have seen many examples of cooperation and support between the region’s ethnicities as they sought to survive the common threat from extremists. That is what it is going take going forward. The seeds of coexistence, as the article below notes, must be preserved and fostered.

The Thanksgiving Holiday just ended, and we can be thankful that it was preceded by significant progress in the negotiations to move towards justice and peace— the exchange of prisoners is a hopeful event. May all killing stop now and the healing and reconstruction of infrastructure and especially human beings begin.

This is the New York Times Opinion Piece on which this post is based.