Essay

Comment

Gaza

Israel

Middle East

War & peace

18 December 2023

8 min read

A peacemaker’s guide to keeping hope alive

Amid continuing despair around the Israel-Hamas war, former diplomat Todd Deatherage shares the practices of the peacemaker.

Todd Deatherage

Todd is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Telos Group. It forms communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and conflict, including Israel/Palestine.

Two people down a table turn and listen to someone closer talk, against a wall mural.

Reconciliation event, Northern Ireland.

Telos Group.

The world seems enveloped in darkness right now. The list of things that hide and extinguish the light is long, but for many of us it is the ongoing war in the Middle East that casts shadows of gloom and foreboding over our days and sometimes our sleepless nights.

As I write, Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza continue to die daily from unrelenting bombardment. Treatable injuries and illnesses are now fatal. Many lack access to food and clean water. About 134 Israelis remain in captivity. The West Bank teeters on the brink as ideological settlers pursue an agenda of harassment and displacement of Palestinian villagers.

Israelis and Palestinians remain deeply traumatized people and are transferring their untransformed traumas onto each other in endless cycles of conflict that are brutal to both, though glaringly asymmetrical. The rest of the world cheers and rationalizes and mourns and protests and marches and divides itself as the body count in Gaza soars.

‘Hope is not the same thing as optimism, hope is not a feeling. Hope is what you do.’

Mitri Raheb

Even for those of us watching from a distance, despair is unavoidable, and in many ways, the only rational response. Who dares speak of hope amidst such horror? And yet, without hope we are all lost. Hope is essential for life and flourishing--a life devoid of it is only existence. But how do we face such a brutal reality and look to the future with any sense of a better one? Is it even possible?

Hope is possible, even in such a time as this, but only if we define it correctly. The Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb says that hope is not the same thing as optimism, hope is not a feeling. Hope is what you do. We push back against violence, hatred and fear by living and acting in hopeful ways. Daily acts of resistance against injustice and brutality protect and nurture our humanity and open up space for our own transformation. As we allow ourselves to be transformed we can be better agents of healing in the world around us. Hope is what you do. It is an active, intentional, clear-eyed yet generous way of living in the world.

The physicist Niels Bohr said the opposite of a fact is a falsehood but the opposite of a truth may be another profound truth.

And it’s important to connect hope and action in a moment like this in particular because the horror we’re witnessing has a context. This is not a natural disaster. We're not where we are simply because bad things happen, but because we brought ourselves here. Because too many have believed the lie that freedom and security come through violence, and that equality and peace can come via ideologies of exclusion and religious or ethnic superiority. We have accepted the fiction that our lives are not interrelated with those of our neighbors. And we have imagined that inequitable systems of subjugation and control can be sustained forever.

And so we keep hope alive by embracing the truth and grounding ourselves in the conviction that the death and destruction of this war will only lead to more of the same. Our words and our actions in this moment can be demonstrations of hope when they are rooted in a steely conviction that the horror of October 7th did not make Palestinians freer, and nothing that’s happened since is making Israel, or any of us, safer. This is how we got into this, not how we get out of it. Violence begets violence begets violence. We act in hope by calling for a ceasefire and the release of hostages. And ultimately we set our sights on a new reality in which Palestinians and Israelis can enjoy freedom, dignity and security in equal measure.

Here are some practices of the peacemaker that not only represent acts of hope but that open the possibility to bring about change in us and change in the world.

Listen to understand. Many of us live within the sound of only one narrative of the shared reality of Israelis and Palestinians. Listening to understand those whose stories are new to us is a first step in nurturing the empathy that will allow us to see the humanity of all.

Listening to those with whom we disagree, not to combat or argue, but to truly understand has the potential to sharpen what we know and believe even as it holds open the possibility of lowering the temperature between us and the person being seen and heard. And this may expose that behind our disagreement may be something deeper. (Hint: It’s often fear.)

Learn to hold experiences in tension. The physicist Niels Bohr said the opposite of a fact is a falsehood but the opposite of a truth may be another profound truth. Palestinians and Israelis each have their own connections to the same piece of land, their unique histories and experiences, and any honest peacemaking effort great or small has to hold these experiences in tension, not as equally true, but as the things that must be understood and dealt with in any effort at conflict resolution.

Peacemakers know the importance of centering the voices of those most vulnerable. In this case, that has to begin today with the millions of displaced Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the families of the hostages, the Israelis who’ve fled their homes in the south and north of their country, and the Palestinians trapped and apprehensive in the West Bank fearing all this is coming their way.

Peacemakers also acknowledge that each of us has agency. We may think our influence is small, but we have communities and circles of friends, we have elected leaders who are meant to be responsive to our concerns. There are always things we can do, and the cumulative effect of many small actions can bring change.

At a time of such horror and atrocity, casting blame is an easy and natural response. But what can’t be overlooked for those who want to create hope is the necessity of doing the honest work of self-interrogation. The persistence of antisemitism for centuries and its alarming rise in the present, coupled with the growth of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments, force us each not only to examine our internal biases and those that exist within our own communities, but also to confront them. Credible voices from within our communities are needed, to borrow from Jesus of Nazareth, to point out the proverbial logs in our own eyes so that we might see more clearly to help our neighbor remove the splinters from theirs.

Part of the work of self-interrogation is also to own our complicity in creating the conditions we see today. For too long our governments in the West have acted as if the blockade of Gaza was somehow sustainable, and that Israel can perpetually occupy the West Bank with no political horizon for a better reality. And in recent years, the Americans have pursued a fiction that Arab-Israeli normalization could proceed with abandon while the Palestinians fall ever deeper into Israeli control and their own internal political dysfunction.

The fact that we are a party to this conflict---our implication in it--- also creates the opportunity and the imperative to transform our involvement into morally grounded policies and interventions that create greater space for the work of peacemaking and conflict resolution. Which leads us to advocacy as an essential practice of peacemaking

He told us the peacemakers are blessed. His universal invitation to live as his ambassadors of reconciliation and healing still echoes down through the centuries as a calling the world so desperately needs.

In the West, as an atrocity of historic proportions is being perpetrated right now, in real time, in our lifetime, we have to call on our leaders to end the ruination of Gaza. To work to return the hostages. To truly commit our governments to cease being peacetalkers and to become peacemakers. To use our influence to create the conditions for true security, honored dignity and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis alike, in equal measure. To support diplomatic initiatives, political arrangements and grass roots efforts that are all oriented toward their mutual flourishing,

For people of Christian faith, these dark days have now taken us into our season of Advent. The American Episcopal theologian Fleming Rutledge says “Advent always begins in the dark.” But it ends with the arrival of God in our midst, God with those in the ravaged kibbutzim of southern Israel. God with those in the bombed out wreckage of the cities and refugee camps of Gaza. And God with those cowering in fear in their homes in Bethlehem, the very place where the Christian story begins. In a normal year we sing, some years deeply from our hearts and our sadness, 'O Come O Come, Emmanuel, and rescue us'. This year that cry is nearly guttural for many of us. But it is a cry rooted in a belief that God has not forsaken us in our hatreds and our violence and our inhumanity. He is a God of transformation and invites us to join him in the work of healing and repair. Jesus came to make the world more merciful and just, to teach us to love our enemies, and to show us how to care for the weak and the vulnerable. He told us the peacemakers are blessed. His universal invitation to live as his ambassadors of reconciliation and healing still echoes down through the centuries as a calling the world so desperately needs. This Advent, let us live as agents of hope as we work for a future in Israel/Palestine---and in our own communities-- in which all can flourish in justice, security, freedom and dignity.

Essay

Comment

Politics

War & peace

30 August 2024

7 min read

What it takes to travel from ceasefire to peace

With Bertie Ahern, Kevin Hargaden explores an unlikely journey.

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

A TV graphic labelled 'ceasefire' lists bullet points

How the news was reported in 1994.

RTE.

August 31st marks the thirtieth anniversary of the historic IRA ceasefire. After decades of effective civil war in Northern Ireland, on this day in 1994, the nationalist paramilitary force announced “the complete cessation of military operations” and declared that they looked forward to a just and lasting settlement with “a spirit of determination and confidence”. While not without interruptions, that ceasefire has led to more than just a cessation of conflict. While still fragile, Northern Ireland has a functioning parliament, closer ties than ever with the Republic of Ireland, and the dissident threat – still present – is marginalised.

One of the remarkable elements of that day at the end of summer 1994 was how unlikely it seemed just a year before. The intensity of “The Troubles”, as the conflict is called, varied over the years but a series of atrocities in 1993 left an already traumatised population in a state of desperation. In March of that year, the IRA exploded bombs in the market town of Warrington. This callous attack clearly sought to strike terror into the hearts of English civilians – people who had no real connection to whatever injustices had been inflicted on the nationalist communities of Northern Ireland. Two children, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, were killed and almost sixty people were injured.

Another IRA bombing, in October of that year, caused outrage and disgust across Britain and Ireland. Again, hitting a civilian population, the Shankill Road bombing had been intended to target Loyalist leaders but ended up devastating a fishmongers. Ten people were killed.

Brutal responses followed from the Loyalist side. Five days after the Warrington bomb, the Ulster Defence Association murdered four construction workers and a week after the Shankill Road bombing the same organisation descended upon a Halloween party held in a bar in rural Derry, killing 8 people and leaving 12 with dire injuries.

Along with many other atrocities, the year ended with most people on the island dreading another generation of pointless violence. But below the surface, intense grassroots efforts and official negotiations were beginning to bear fruit.

The viewer is bound to see the peace process that emerged as a kind of miracle. How could forgiveness reign in the face of such savagery? How can a society build a future out of the wreckage of such a past?

This story is told vividly in the BBC documentary Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. Spread across five episodes, the show does not intend to offer an encyclopaedic analysis of how the Troubles emerged. Instead, it focusses on the experiences of the ordinary people embroiled – whether intentionally or not – in the conflict. The effect is deeply moving, even overwhelming at times.

So often, our culture engages with war and conflict as abstract concepts to be debated. Even in the context of active, live battle, we are typically presented with “talking heads” offering expert opinion. But in Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland you get to hear from the people who planned the attack, or who conducted the arrests, or who were just trying to buy some fish for dinner when a bomb exploded in the shop. This direct testimony from those were caught up in the Troubles allows the viewer a visceral understanding of what is at stake, without having to understand the centuries of colonialism, conflict, and oppression that generated the civil war. That human trauma, that is glimpsed in great poetry or felt as an echo in a folk song is captured in this series directed by the award-winning James Bluemel.

There is a stubborn misunderstanding that the Northern Irish conflict was “Catholics against Protestants”. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland disposes of this myth, if in part by showing how those two groups were never distinct. It was a complex conflict fuelled by land and ideology, traumatic history and conflicting cultures. Religion was a component of course, but expressed through the lens of sectarianism, the almost racial animosity that grew up between the opposing tribes, the marker that differentiated them. When one man, named Michael, is shown tending gently to the racing pigeons he keeps, the effect is incongruous in the extreme because his story is one of unimaginable despair.

He was raised Catholic; his mother was Protestant. She had ten children. And one day, two women showed up at their home and took his mother away and she never returned. The IRA killed her. It wasn’t because of her views on Papal primacy or biblical authority. Something even more absurd and terrifying was at work here, a hatred that at some point did not even need justification.

The consequences of each callous and brutal attack rippled outwards, affecting not just the victims but their loved ones and then their community. By the end of the five episodes the viewer is bound to see the peace process that emerged as a kind of miracle. How could forgiveness reign in the face of such savagery? How can a society build a future out of the wreckage of such a past?

That was their baseline assumption throughout – no one at the table was “happy with the fact that thousands of people had been killed and maimed.”

This exposes one of the limitations of the format of the series. By placing the perspectives of ordinary people at the centre of the narrative, profound truths are exposed. But the mundane details of how the peace process developed – why it was the IRA agreed to a ceasefire and how things developed from there to the Good Friday Agreement and the years since – are unaddressed. Perhaps a sequel is required where the politicians and diplomats who made that possible are given the chance to tell that story?

One of the undoubted architects of peace in Northern Ireland is Bertie Ahern, who was the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Republic of Ireland from 1997-2008. I sat down with him to do just that – to hear his recollections of the process that brought about peace. Since his youth, he had always taken a keen interest in Northern Ireland – “I took a particular interest in the Civil Rights movement when we were in school; that was before it got into the violence.” Raised in a Republican family just north of Dublin city centre, once the Troubles began, it was hard “not to be subsumed into everything that was happening on the island.” As he became a political leader, he was keenly aware of how the violent conflict exacerbated underlying problems – even his vision for economic regeneration in the Republic was blocked because “part of the reason that it was difficult to get investment and to get people to come here was the Troubles.”

As he remembers the process, it would be misleading to think it popped out of nowhere in the 1990s. There had been attempts through the years, notably with the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, but also through less publicised conversations between the peacemakers and paramilitaries, like the conversations led by Fr Gerry Reynolds at Clonard Monastery – which began to generate movement. He attributes the ceasefire to the Downing Street Declaration that was orchestrated by the British Prime-minister John Major and Ahern’s then boss, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, on December 15, 1993. That showed a serious willingness from London to engage, and the 1994 ceasefire was the result.

But when the ceasefire broke down in 1996, all that work dissipated. “That was a disaster, really.” With the election of Tony Blair, Ahern suggested they “take it up again”. With a concerted focus – “I was nearly doing the Northern stuff full-time” – progress was restored. He remembers that the negotiations involved ten different parties, including the British and Irish governments and the active and influential participation from the American government and “went on practically non-stop from September 1997 to Good Friday 1998.” The strategy sought to be as inclusive as possible – “we would try and get everyone in” – and “to be as comprehensive on the issues” as possible, so that no issue was off the table. Patience and resilience were central. Although there was “a huge amount of conversation and talks up to Christmas, it didn’t really gather momentum until February.”

With the “totality of all the issues out on the table”, the dialogues began to bear fruit. How draconian legislation might be rolled back, how paramilitary prisoners could be released, how demilitarization would proceed and how the police could be reformed. He remembers that negotiations on that question – the reform of the corrupt Royal Ulster Constabulary police force – went on deep into the Good Friday night, April 10th. When an obstacle appeared, the London and Dublin governments reminded people of the goal of stopping the violence. That was their baseline assumption throughout – no one at the table was “happy with the fact that thousands of people had been killed and maimed.” The second guiding principle was that “you have to try to treat everyone with dignity, regardless of what views they have.” And slowly, rapport was built up between people who had been combatants.

When the agreement was finalised, a kind of euphoria followed. “That week we were just at it night and day; we had been at it night and day since March.” But the celebrations, as intense as they were, did not linger. The agreement had to be passed by popular referendum in both the North and the Republic of Ireland. And the work continued even after that. Ahern notes that it took years to achieve an agreement “and then another ten years to implement it”.

But the effort was undeniably worth it. “I think the big success of the Good Friday Agreement was that the Troubles have by and large ended.” And the story of how that happens traces back to a cassette tape released in August 1994 announcing the IRA ceasefire.