Searching Out Silver Linings
By Michael Nagler
ALTHOUGH, or perhaps because, Gandhi felt deeply the suffering the Jews had gone through in Western Europe, he did not look with favor on the creation of a ‘Jewish State’ in Palestine. He felt instead that Jews should live with dignity in whatever land they found themselves. However naïve that may seem after the Holocaust, given the 75 years of insecurity Israel has endured 𑁋 and the horrors it is now inflicting to maintain itself (with its powerful enabler, our America), it does make you think that maybe he was on to something,
Being Jewish and American, I might be thought to be doubly affected by the brutality the Israeli military is visiting on Gaza, but I find myself reacting to it as a human being and a passionate advocate for nonviolence. I have no sense how this violence will end, except that Israel will be 𑁋 already is 𑁋 irreparably damaged and in the long run the world’s Jews may well be without a viable homeland.
In terms of the world at large 𑁋 and this conflict has a global resonance, I don’t think we should repose much hope in humanity reacting with such revulsion to the spectacle that we turn away from violence 𑁋 if we had such sensitivity we would have done that a long time ago. Yet some kind of awakening might happen that might lead to some constructive developments. Not that they would make up for all this suffering, nor is there any guarantee they will actually see the light of day; but they are much less likely to happen if we don’t talk about them.
What might they look like?
Seeing so painfully the utter impotence of the “international community” to stop this horror, even with the offices of the UN and the ICC, perhaps some recognition will dawn that we are a human family and need to learn that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther King authored that saying, but the Greek historian Thucydides voiced a similar notion in his famous Melian Dialogue: “Those who do not protect justice when they are strong will not have it to protect them when they are weak.” Along these lines, perhaps hawkish regimes and the Netanyahus, Orbans, and Putins who lead them will lose some of their luster. They may lose it to the more humane leadership of a King, a Gandhi, a Mandela.
Peace science 𑁋 yes, it exists 𑁋 would come out of the shadows. No longer the purview or a few scholars and activists (and scholar-activists) and become, slowly but surely, an option that people in general and their political representatives know is available to them.
Organizations that perform what’s called civilian-based peacekeeping would, accordingly, rise into prominence and get the funding and recognition they deserve. Thank you, Blue Helmets, but instead of sending you out with weapons you’re told not to use we’ll be sending others 𑁋 and you too, if you choose to come on board! 𑁋with a matchless weapon you can use.
None of this can happen without a new culture to back it up. Such a culture is emerging, but ‘not to where you’d notice it’ in the media or, consequently, how most people think and vote. But paradigms change, and we rarely see it coming. What we can see is when we show people a new path, as my friend Mel Duncan of Nonviolent Peaceforce put it recently, we hasten the day the world will walk it.
