Mustn’t ‘peace’ mean more than just the absence of war?

People have been crying for peace, peace, more loudly in the civilized West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7^th attack on Israel by Hamas. We good Westerners have tended to ignore conflicts in other parts of the world.

In our religion studies after Mass on Sunday, we were going over the meaning of the word “peace.” The Gospel reading for next Sunday is Luke 10:1-12, which includes:

³ Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. ⁴ Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes; and greet no one on the way. ⁵ Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’ ⁶ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. ⁷ Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you; for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house. ⁸ Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; ⁹ and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

The commentary in the study guides brought up the definition of shalom as it is used in Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was “to make something whole”. Not just regarding practical restoration of things that were lost or stolen. But with an overall sense of fulness and completeness in mind, body and estate.

Too often in English, we see the word ‘peace’ as meaning the absence of direct violence or war. Thus, when people call for peace between Russia and Ukraine, or between Israel and the Arabs, they too often mean just a ceasefire. A ceasefire in itself is a very basic good, but mustn’t peace actually mean more than that? Mustn’t peace mean more than “I am not trying to kill anyone, and no one is trying to kill me”, but also mean “I don’t want to kill anyone, and no one wants to kill me”?

In this, we have two different situations. While there are some relatively small ethnic and linguistic differences between the Russians and Ukrainians, the Russian and Ukrainian people, by and large, had no hostile intentions toward the other. But we had Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the President of Russia, who has more than once lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the breakup of the USSR led to the separation of nations which were once part of the Tsarist empire from long before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and Mr Putin seems determined to get that land back! After 3¼ years of war now, I would imagine that the Russians and Ukrainians once again have ill will toward each other, inflamed by the passions of blood and steel, but they were (mostly) at true peace with each other before.

The whole world saw how Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević was able to reinflame the ethnic hatreds which has been tamped down by the forced integration of Yugoslavia under the Communist rule of Josip Broz Tito, from liberation from the Nazis in 1945 until his death in 1980. Yugoslavia tried to continue that suppression of ethnic strife for years after Marshall Tito’s death, but Mr was able to use them to reinstate Serbian domination of the country until it broke apart.

It seems to be pretty easy to get people to hate those who are different from them.

That isn’t the case with that Arabs — and Muslims, to include Iran, which is not an Arab nation — and Israelis. Hamas have long been directing the education of children in Gaza toward the hatred of Jews. The religious leaders of Iran have been spewing anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-Western civilization hatred since they deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini referred to the Shah as “the Jewish agent, the American serpent whose head must be smashed with a stone,” thus throwing all three Islamic hatreds into one phrase.

Forty-six years of Iran being overarchingly led — there is a secular government, but they are beholden to the clerics — by the Islamic clergy has led to two generations of Iranians being educated under of a system which promotes hatred of Jews.

Armed Israeli police, at the Fourth Station of the Cross, Via Dolorosa, November 13, 2022. Photo by D R Pico, may be freely used with proper attribution.

There is less on how Israel educates its children when it comes to the Arabs, but the vast majority of Israelis are conscripted into the armed services and taught how to use weapons to defend against Arab attacks, and Israeli police, armed with automatic weapons to defend against potential terrorist attacks, are a common enough sight on the streets in Jerusalem that the public have to be conditioned to the thought that the ‘Palestinians’ could attack at any moment. The photo to the left was taken eleven months before the October 7^th massacre.

That there can be another ceasefire between Israel and the Arabs in the so-called ‘Palestinian’ areas, and with distant Iran is obviously possible; there had been such for years previously. But a ceasefire meets only the most basic definition of peace, that of not trying to kill your enemies and your enemies not trying to kill you. The idea of the Israelis and Arabs/Muslims not wanting to kill each other seems much further away, an entire generation away.