Why is peace so hard?
As the assault on Gaza resumes I am reminded of the quote by Albert Einstein: ‘Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved by understanding’.
Where is our understanding?
Understanding should be the work of government. It is the work of allies. More importantly it is the work of enemies. It is the work of neighbourhoods and communities. It is the work of artists and thinkers. It’s the work of us.
Building understanding is more powerful than building bombs. If you drop understanding 50 metres from a hospital you deliver supplies not more bodies. Right now it’s absent. We have a massive understanding deficit and because of it, people are suffering. The absence of understanding underwrites this conflict that is reaching across the world and tearing our communities asunder. Like it’s a football match and you have to pick which side to barrack for. I barrack for peace. I barrack for the pathway that delivers hope. I do not believe it’s impossible, only that narratives persist to make it so.
On the weekend Danny Almagor and Berry Liberman, the founders of Small Giants hosted Prayers for Peace in Melbourne. I received an email about the concert and this quote stayed with me. ‘We love my Israeli family and friends. We love my Palestinian friends. And I don’t understand why there aren’t more of us coming together to talk, to share, to build bridges, to vision a better future. To talk about peace. To talk about understanding. To sit together in grief. To sit together in hope. To learn how to replace fear and hate with love and respect.’
Yes.
Sometimes in all of this, we have to stop and find our humanity. Something wiser, deeper and more evolved. You see peace is hard. It takes compromise. It takes forgiveness. It takes acknowledging what has happened. It takes change and transformation. It takes vision. It takes leadership. It takes stopping killing.
Peace has always sounded like something hippies do on the weekend. It’s been ridiculed and minimised as unrealistic. As something naive and untested. As something not aligned with human evolution. But it’s not. Peace is enormously complex and co-operative. Peace is a delicate architecture built on the bones of our loss. It is charged with the stories of who we were and what we have overcome. It acknowledges our suffering. It rises above resentment. It is vast and enlightened and powerful. It is bigger than war. It is more impressive than any structure we could build. Peace is the ultimate human technology. It is beautiful and raw and mysterious. Peace rises from its trauma shadow. Peace is better than hope. It’s real. It’s possible. It is the place where we birth our children. It’s the future.
Peace and nonviolence is the conversation we need to be having. It’s a philosophy we need to embed. Peace is a way of living together so that all members of society can achieve their human rights.
And it must be achieved with nonviolence.
Nonviolence is not the easy way out. Gandhi considered violence crude and in the long run ineffective. How many bodies are enough? When does it end? Gandhi understood nonviolence from its Sanskrit root ‘Ahimsa’. It implies total nonviolence, no physical violence and no passive violence. Ahimsa translates as love. It’s beautiful and obvious. It’s the place of return for all religious texts.
For a moment, when the killing stopped, there was hope. No matter the circumstances, I don’t believe violence is ever the answer. When the dead bodies of thousands of children pile like confetti, surely we have to ask, is there another way?
There has to be.
Ceasefire.
And a new pathway to peace.
– Mandy Nolan
Here endeth the lesson
You really are a simpleton Mandy, start living in the real world.
It’s a bit rich Mandy, writing all this pious, saintly peace sentiment then dropping “Ceasfire!” at the end like an incendiary 💣.
Was that your picture in an Echo edition recently – holding up a sign with the same message, “Ceasefire” – outside Justine Elliott’s office? Was it about supporting the Greens pro Palestinian stance? Was it all about being peace loving or was it about taking sides and the picture op?
What were you suggesting? That the member for Richmond is personally dropping the bombs on Gaza? That the government she represents is doing all it can to prolong the conflict? That Justine and/or the Australian Government could stop it right now if they chose?
Both the Coalition and the Greens, it seems to me, are seeking political advantage from this tragedy. I haven’t, however, heard the Coalition being all kumbya about peace 😇.
Trying to maintain Einstein’s “understanding” between both diasporas, encouraging a united call for peace and discouraging partisan emotive rhetoric, is the best prospect for peace in this country.
‘Why is peace so hard?’, because different groups have competing interest, and peoples are not interchangeable, we are fundamentally different. But if you want to know why no one is stopping Israel, it is because the Zionist lobbies have staggering control over politics and business in Western Countries, and Israel has nukes. Look up their nuclear doctrine called ‘The Sampson Option’. This conflict is at a very bad time for the western powers, Russia and China and stuff, but they are powerless against this small criminal state, and always have been.
“Zionist lobbies” is the modern version of the old antisemitic calumny “protocols of the elders of Zion”. Israel is not a criminal state, unlike most of the nations that ignorant people never bother to condemn, like China and Syria. There is no “staggering” control – just a paranoid hatred of Jews that goes back thousands of years, and has been renamed as anti-Zionism.
Australia can say ‘No’ to China. We can say ‘No’ to Syria.
Lovely thought but incredibly naive. There will never be peace while homicidal religious maniacs like Hamas, ISIS, Al Quaeda, etc still exist.
Exactly. How do you make peace with a group whose whole modus operandi is your extermination? Who are willing to hide in tunnels under hospitals and schools and let their civilians be killed because they know it’s good propaganda for naive and uninformed foreigners?
Israel made those hospitals, and the tunnels under them, back during the occupation in the 80s. If you want people to stop attacking you, stop doing the things that are harming them. If you keep tormenting them no matter what, they will eventually get the idea that the only way to stop you is to kill you. But instead, you try to drag every other Jew in the world into your mess.
For the first time in 3 years I read your soap box Mandy and for once I agree with you. It’s easy to fling insults and justifications and seek revenge with violence, but real Peace and solutions requires work. Internationally, Federally, locally and individually. The most important one is, to be the change you want to see in the world.
Peace starts when we stop hate.
When we tolerate or incite hate speech against the ‘ different to us’ we start the process of violence.
If you belittle or denigrate a person or entire group based on different opinion, appearance,sexuality , gender, religion, or culture then you are engaging in hate speech and contributing to a spiral of action and opposite reaction that will continue to divide and harm ALL of humanity
Hate is the emotion you feel when something you love is threatened or destroyed. If you want to remove hate from the world, you would have to remove love first, because peoples interest are always going to conflict, and sometimes those conflicts are going to be so great and intractable, that bad stuff is going to happen. You can skew the dynamic towards great amounts of peaceful conflict resolution, or at least compromise, but you can never remove all of it without eliminating humanity. Then you would have to start eliminating animals too, as they are subject to the same universal dynamics. Even ants have wars.
Too right Derek.
Lovely sentiment, but you are living in a dream world. There will never be peace in the world while religious fanatics remain, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. What Hamas did to Israel was terrible and an act of terrorism, but what do you expect when Israel has treated Palestine people like animals for decades. They are both at fault. What we need is a re-think on how the UN Security Council works. Remove the veto rights of the permanent members, and go for a majority vote, otherwise nothing will ever get done. Get a UN backed peace keeping body in there, implement and enforce the two state solution and let these people live in peace. Sadly, I think my solution has as much chance at success as your’s Mandy…..