Peace in the Face of War

Andrew White, ‘the Vicar of Baghdad’, in his article, Give Peace a Chance,
brings us to the negotiating table and gives us a sense of the creative
work involved in negotiating peace at the political level in the Middle East
among nations that are intensely religious. Discussions leading to politicoreligious
peace are built on intellectual/spiritual foundations. It starts with
strengthening relationships of persons, establishing trust. The work usually
suffers many setbacks, but eventually can bring monumental social and
spiritual rewards.
Uri Avnery, a self–proclaimed secular Jew, wants us to distinguish between
true and false kinds of political peace. Drawing lessons from history, he
applies these various scenarios to a two–state solution between Israelis
and Palestinians. As one of its original architects, he writes elsewhere that
nations have to know sovereignty, preferably without dictatorship, before
they can taste the fundamentals of freedom. False amalgamation of cultures
into single nation states that neglect cultural boundaries and identities,
eventually break up into independent sovereign states: Ireland and Northern
Ireland, for example; former Czechoslovakia into Czechs and Slovaks;
former Yugoslavia into Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Slovenes etc; the former
Soviet Union into Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Ukraine etc;
the Kurds, left out during the formation of Turkey, Syria and Iraq, are now
seeking their own sovereign state; and so it goes on. This natural tendency
toward independent sovereignty along lines of identity is the background for
Avnery’s two–state solution between Israel and Palestine.
For the Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his recent book, Not in God’s Name:
Confronting Religious Violence, the key to peace is education. ‘Wars are
won with weapons,’ he writes, ’but it takes ideas to win a peace.’ To this
end, Dr Sacks explores the various kinds of group dynamics that trigger
religious violence in order to understand best how to defuse them; also
the counter-narratives in Hebrew Scriptures and Midrash that provide
sanguine means, such as role reversal, to overcome both the individual and
corporate impulse to violence; and finally the eirenic recourse to the sages
to clear up misunderstandings that religions themselves inadvertently have
caused through their sacred writings, especially when misinterpreted by
fundamentalists. Just as hatred and war are learned, so peace can be taught
and learned. All this is set against the background of a particularly virulent
strain of anti–Semitism that has taken root in the Islamic world since the
Second World War.
Peace is achievable only through a combination of many disciplines and
perspectives coming together collaboratively. None of our authors say that
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