How Great You Think You Are At Creating Peace?

 

People talk a lot about peace. It is ok, there is obviously nothing wrong in wanting peace. But if you have a reality where there is war, then bringing peace requires some effort. If you go around acting as if it is enough to say “just stop”, then it seems that you are saying it is all very easy and simple, “just stop”. Looks like you are saying that people are at war just because they want.

Not that words aren’t important. Obviously they are an undeniably important front in any war. But if you want to change things, I don’t think it is enough to say “war” and “peace” as if these were magic words. You must respect people as human beings and discuss the concepts that brought us all to this point in History.

There has always been war in the world, and now that the West seems to be enjoying a time of relative peace, it is not fair to just treat people that live far as people who just “likes war”.

When it comes to discussing ideas, concepts and History, there is a whole  group of people whose job should be to throw light on concepts. You know, the academical World. But it’s been notorious that they are only seeing one side of what is happening right now, in the Middle East.

If you turn the television on, you will see the portrait of a war that somebody is waging apparently only because they want. If you turn to the Academical World – with few exceptions – you will only find the description of the Israeli State as oppressive, and Israel itself as stolen land.

Think of the end of the 19^th century, it was, all over the World, a bit like and “old west” thing. There was a lot of small pieces of land that weren’t being used by nobody, and people were moving around, finding land, building small villages and such. It was like that in the British Mandate of Palestine, it was like that in the World.

People of different ethnicity sometimes established close to each other and conflicts happened. In the British Mandate of Palestine there were more Arabs, but also a lot of Jews, and even more Jews dreaming to go there to escape the horrors of Europe and return to their ancestral homeland.

When the modern age came, and it came in different years in different places, and the countries we now know were formed in the map, people were displaced, a lot of people in the World.

After the War that came as consequence of Arab refusal to accept the Jewish State, Arabs were displaced from Israel, and Jews from Arab countries. Sad, but not unique, and it shouldn’t have necessarily lead people to think they couldn’t go on with their lives.

Gaza is not a prison, Israel protects Israeli borders because there is terrorism and a country protect their borders. A prison? What about looking in any of the other directions?

But instead of talking about the specific realities, the Academical World has a ready formula to explain everything. You find the one who seems to be poorer economically, then the other is the “oppressor”. They say they defend minorities, don’t they say it all the time? So if there were more Arabs in Palestine and there are still more Arabs in the region – almost four hundred million people in the middle east, which has some pretty rich countries, and less than ten million are Jews – are the Jews not a minority?

And if someone says the terms of the division of the mandate of Palestine were the problem, then why so many Arab leaders said their people shouldn’t accept a Jewish Sovereign land “in the size of a postage stamp”? Their words. A minority with no right at all…

To bring peace we must discuss some things. Try to understand even when someone says something we disagree. Sometimes we must say, “hey, there is an honest guy saying this, I should try to listen”. Lately, I’ve been hearing people that I respect use the word “victimhood” to describe the mentality of people who give themselves the right to go around destroying things instead of building because they blame all their problems on someone else.

I always had a problem with the word “victimhood”, because I’ve seen it used in contexts where I disagreed with it and by people who were really too aggressive against any kind of awareness for the difficulties that certain groups faced more than the others. But I started seeing that there is some truth in the word, when the awareness of the pain of people is used not to create solidarity and union, but to engender hatred.

The key to me is in losing or not your moral center. The moral center is a clear vision of what a right life is, that don’t depend on data. “Some people were marginalized in History” is not something wrong to say, but taking away people’s responsibility for their own acts is.

To me, this is not a paradox at all. You can’t exempt people from acting morally, you would be in fact depriving them of something. “Man can’t live by bread alone”. By excusing someone out of the moral world you are not helping them. We can see that it doesn’t help. It doesn’t bring them the things a good life offers.

As an illustration, having a public lawyer for everybody is good, total impunity is bad. By using our good principles of caring for people who had less chances, to relativize absolutely all of our ethical principles, we are eroding all our chances of finding common ground.

In the context of October7th, a lot of intellectuals used this idea that if you call someone “oppressed”, then this person doesn’t need any morals anymore to justify an attack that not just gone beyond every moral restraint you can imagine, but exploded in open cruelty, with people laughing while doing all other horrors they did.

It is interesting to note how the incoherences of the Academical World fit with the interests of dictators around the World. Does it sound like conspiracy? Well, in this World we usually can’t know exactly how much of the system works by explicit agreement and how much is “coincidence”, but in order to understand why some things seem to be mysteriously pointing in the same direction, it helps to understand what is represented by this “thing” they “coincidentally” oppose.

            Somehow, Israel and also America, and actually the Jewish people too, seem to incarnate what they fight against. And when you look at this “thing” they are fighting against, you see what they have in common. Both a socialist teacher, and an extremist dictator, want to be seen as someone who holds the key to another dimension.

I’ll explain. What is more disgusting, both to a European Mainstream Intellectual and to a Islamic Theocratic Ruler, than people who believe that, once you live in freedom and follow basic moral principles, happiness is within your reach? Both the European Mainstream Intellectual – American Academia seem to be mostly European in it’s Marxist soul – and the Islamic Theocratic ruler have a need to be seen as a special kind of people, selected people, who can see beyond our reality, who know that living and doing your thing “is not enough”, that acting according to simple moral principles “will not be enough”, that happiness lies beyond a veil that only they can see through, because they are special people, and to get there we may even have to do things that look ugly to the “shallow perception” of not-super-enlightened simple people with more down-to-earth common-good moral values. In other words, those two guys are fascists.

You may think I am tripping, but what we are seeing happening in various levels seems to be pointing in the same direction. Press too, obviously, never giving kids any tool to question what a lot of their teachers might be saying, never giving nobody information that might make them see that peace is not just an absence of something bad they are seeing in the news, but something that must be built with some effort in a complex World.

            And there are the social medias with their quick dives into extreme emotions and self-congratulatory virtue feelings without much reasoning about more complex causes and effects. I don’t want to scare any family, but what I can say is that my 8 years old son don’t have any social media and he already knows that Tic Toc is the Chinese Communist Party trying to make us less rational.

So you have an intellectual world largely contaminated by vengeance-based bias that is pushing radical people to the streets, a social media that helps them and a press who portraits these manifestations as just spontaneous feelings of concern from normal people, which makes more people buy the “movement”, closing some kind of a circle that feeds itself.

            Then you have this wave happening in various levels. The very intentional bias of what unfortunately seems like the majority of Social Sciences being echoed in social media, denied by television – because if they don’t talk about it, maybe it’s not important – all of that surrounding the common people to make them feel obliged to make a stand, or else they will feel guilty. “Don’t you want to take the streets and be a real pacifist?”

            Well, you prefer peace to war, that’s good, but you should consider you are not the only one. But what peace is this that only sees one side? You only see the suffering of the Palestinians. Well, that’s real, Hamas provoked a war that is causing a lot of pain to the people in Gaza.

But how can you speak of peace to the Israelis if your message is “I don’t see you”, “I don’t care if they still have a hundred of you as hostages”, “I don’t think it’s worth mentioning that your girls were raped”, “I think the death toll in October 7^th was small”, “I don’t see nothing specially abominating in the methods of October 7^th”, “I don’t care if tens of thousands had to leave their homes”, “I don’t see the missiles fired against you”, “I think your soldiers are dying because they chose to”?

            If you have a reality of War, then, if you want to get to peace, there is work to be done. How is Israel going to trust the World to conduct this process of peace if everybody just turned a blind eye while an ideology of pure hatred was dominating big portions of the World, and extremist governments started funding terror groups, and the International Organizations, that were there to protect these people, did nothing against the radicalization and the militarization of the people?

            How is Israel going to trust a World that accuses them of genocide, without caring for the actual meaning of the word, because supposedly these everybody cares infinitely for people dying in wars, but didn’t have ten percent of the anger in bigger and worst situations in the World?

            The conflict in Syria caused more than two hundred thousand deaths and fourteen millions displaced since 2014. China has been keeping millions of Uyghur muslins in concentration camps, with silence from the “brothers” from Iran, for instance. The Russian invasion of Ukraine have caused more than a hundred thousand deaths. The Somali War caused more deaths than all of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And there is more.

This is not to say that deaths somewhere else simply justify killing here, I’m saying all this just to point that there is a total lack of evidence to show that people care so desperately about deaths in wars as they are screaming now. And the World really have to start making a better work if we want people to see us as efficient peace makers, if we want to say, “trust us, we will help this peace to happen”.

            I know the words “just stop” sound very appealing, as if you were talking to a couple of neighbors who got in a stupid fight that is getting worst, and you know that if they “just stop” both will live longer and happier lives. Did you check the facts to make this simplification?

You say human lives is what matters, and I agree it is, but how can you guarantee your desired outcomes? The future is unknown. Everybody knows what the best imaginable outcome of a ceasefire is, but what about the possibility of a giant war that might already have started being prepared, a war that could destroy countries, force the World into a huge disastrous fight, with much bigger losses on all sides?

            From our comfortable sits in the West, such a thing may be unimaginable, and I pray it never happens. I have no problem admitting I don’t know the future, but I am able to at least imagine how things must look like for a country whose soldiers have gone into neighbor territories and found Kilometers of highly equipped tunnels, guns and ammunition and military gears literally everywhere, tons of explosives, Information Technology, along with propaganda that commands people to a total war with anything that is different from them. Their leaders did state their goals of escalation.

            I hope none of that happens, but Israel is the one in the most vulnerable position, and even if we don’t have a bigger war, leaving terror groups and attacks unresponded can increase, by the year, the danger for human lives, both Israeli and Palestinian.

            There was no reality of perfect peace that was broken by Israel suddenly invading your television. There is a situation of conflict. And the words that sound “better” in an echo chamber are not necessarily the ones that will bring the best outcome.

            Ceasefire should be demanded from the side who started the conflict and is admittedly trying to completely destroy the opponent, demanded from the side that has been proven to not give a damn for their own population. And in the case of a terror organization that only exist for that – read their charter – I think surrender would be the perfect ceasefire.

            It’s that, or accusing a nation that, after suffering their worst attack, had to go to war with tears in their eyes. At least, they didn’t see happy to me that day.