Amid violence from Maine to the Middle East, ‘peace’ becomes a dangerous word

Even as someone who came of age during the assassinations and riots of 1968 and had to tell two grade school kids about the carnage of 9/11, I struggle to remember a more depressing moment for Planet Earth than the past week. It wasn’t just the unspeakable violence that spanned the oceans from the AR-15 carnage inside a Maine bowling alley and barroom to the hundreds of children crushed under the rubble of bombed-out Gaza.

What made it even worse is that humans who should have known better — who did nothing even after a madman mowed down kindergartners in a Connecticut classroom, or who shrugged while Middle East leaders (on both sides) saw bloodshed over peace as their path to amassing power.

In Washington, our new Christian nationalist House Speaker Mike Johnson says America’s mass shootings aren’t caused by guns but “the human heart,” even though human hearts from Canada to Cameroon don’t shoot other people like in the armed and dangerous United States, where the 18 people gunned down by a mentally ill Army reservist marked the 535th mass shooting this year.

Nearby, in the corridors of power in the White House and the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, U.S. officials speak privately that Israel’s nonstop and indiscriminate assault, believed to have killed more than 2,000 children in Gaza, is becoming morally indefensible — an ill-thought-out response to a horrific Hamas terror attack likely to make the Middle East more dangerous, not more safe. Yet all but a handful are terrified to even utter the word cease-fire.

Suddenly, we find ourselves in a moment of unspeakable violence when peace has become the most dangerous word — where daring to say that we don’t need to live like this can risk your political career or holding onto your job. That’s why I can’t think of anything more important right now than offering praise, love, and support for those heroes willing to risk speaking the truth.

Jared Golden, a Democratic congressman from Maine, is a hero. A Marine Corps veteran who narrowly clings to his seat in a rural district chock full of gun-owning hunters, which was won by Donald Trump in 2016, Golden has been just one of a couple of Democratic votes in the House against banning or even restricting the sale of assault weapons — until the horrific and grisly death of 18 of his constituents.

In a stunningly rare Profiles in Courage move that might risk his reelection, Golden apologized for his past stance and reversed course in promising to fight to ban these weapons of war from U.S. society. The congressman courageously said his past view was built upon “a false confidence that our community was above this, and that we could be in full control, among many other misjudgments.” He humbly asked Maine “for forgiveness and support.”

But Golden wasn’t the only one courageous enough last week to speak out against violence — to say the opposite of what would be easy and predictable, at great personal risk. In the days since Israel stepped up its lethal retaliatory strikes on Palestinians in Gaza, hundreds of American Jews have been arrested in a congressional office building and then for shutting down New York’s Grand Central Station during Friday rush hour, pleading for peace in the region.

“I don’t believe in this war,” Rosalind Petchesky, an 81-year-old member of Jewish Voice for Peace, told the New York Times before she and about 200 others were arrested. A pediatrician whose job is making kids healthier, Steve Auerbach told the paper he took part because he couldn’t abide the children dying in the Gaza bombardment. “This has to stop,” he said. “Calling for a cease-fire should be considered a mainstream, normative position.”

It is … in Israel.

The Jewish state is understandably reeling from the unconscionable and unspeakably brutal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 Israelis, many of them civilians, and took more than 200 hostages. Yet a nationwide poll last week found 49% of Israelis now supported holding off on the ground invasion of Gaza that appears to be underway. On Saturday night in Tel Aviv, protesters carried signs outside the Israeli Defense Ministry calling for a cease-fire and endorsing the pleas of many hostage families for a swap that would release all or most of an estimated 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for their loved ones.

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A pause in the deadly fighting and intensified hostage negotiations seems the most serious path to preventing an unthinkable escalation of the conflict, yet here in America, voicing support for the aspirations of everyday Palestinians or the wrongness of collectively punishing its civilians for the war crimes of Hamas can put their reputations and livelihood in danger.

Just ask Michael Eisen, the University of California, Berkeley professor who lost his job as editor of the academic journal eLife because he dared to praise the “moral clarity” of a satirical headline in the Onion, “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” Or former Artforum editor David Velasco, fired for publishing an open letter from artists calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

“I have never lived through a more chilling period,” the photographer Nan Goldin, who’d signed the open letter, told the New York Times. “People are being blacklisted. People are losing their jobs.” Ground Zero has been America’s college campuses, where students making strong statements in support of the Palestinian cause have been “doxed” on trucks that conservative activists park on campus, or lost job offers from white-shoe law firms. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s public universities to shut down a pro-Palestinian campus group — proving that whatever the far-right’s obsession with “cancel culture” is about, it’s not about the liberty of unfettered speech.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly with Students for Justice in Palestine endorsing the attack by Hamas, but to be an American is to defend their right to say something that outrageous — or at least it’s supposed to be. Free speech gives us the power to condemn all forms of hate — including ugly moments of antisemitism we’ve seen on the fringes of recent protests, like ripping down posters of hostages. But we should also acknowledge that too many bad-faith actors are degrading the fight against actual antisemitism by abusing the term to chill legitimate criticism of Israel’s far-right government and its approach.

The result of these fear tactics is often deafening silence. Consider an issue that strikes close to home: the killing of 24 journalists since the fighting began, the vast majority in strikes by Israel (as well as an Israeli strike that killed the family of a prominent Al Jazeera journalist). Far too many of the groups and organizations that routinely condemn the wanton killing of reporters and photographers when the culprits have been Mexican drug lords or Russia’s Vladimir Putin have been silent about these war crimes in the Middle East.

The urgency of pursuing peace over war ought to be a no-brainer. It’s why the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, is calling for an immediate cease-fire, writing that “a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in front of our eyes.” It’s why the U.N. General Assembly just voted 120-14 (with 45 abstentions) for “a humanitarian truce” in Gaza, in a resolution introduced by Canada and supported by most of our European and Asian allies.

Two of the 14 no votes came from Israel and the United States. That’s shameful. It’s past time that we begin opening our eyes to the cultures of domination and death that have taken root in our struggling democracy — that the unwillingness to ban weapons that only exist for the hunting and killing of human beings, the desire to spend more on tanks, troops, and jet fighters than the next 10 nations combined, and the insanity of dropping more bombs on the Middle East and expecting different results all come from the same sick place. And it needs to go away.

This should all be thoroughly depressing for anyone like me, who grew up in the shadows of our Vietnam War mistakes in the 1960s and ‘70s, who absorbed the message from the radio that we should “give peace a chance” and that war was good for “absolutely nothing,” and who naively thought things would be different when our generation was in charge. Not only did we never give peace a chance, but we created a world where your world can be turned upside down just for talking about it.

That’s why it’s so important to celebrate the heroes who can see our reality and refuse to keep quiet. That includes the living ones like Rep. Jared Golden and Rosalind Petchesky, and also those who gave their lives for peace like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who told us that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

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