“My hope is that the children of Isaac and children of Ishmael will come together and tell the extremists to go take a hike so that we can eat hummus and dates and watch our children frolic together.” –Rabbi Michael Adam Latz.

“Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of disrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful arduous pursuit of restoration and justice.” Shane Clairborne, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. 

To be clear, evil is cloaked in any claim that asserts one class of persons is either unworthy or inferior to another. If one side of a conflict is grounding its motives for aggression on such a false claim, it is in the wrong, even as both sides may to the outward eye be engaging in similar acts of conflict.

This was the case in the American Civil War, when the pro-slavery South was justifying its slaughter on the false notion of the inherent inferiority of Blacks. It was the case in World War II where the Nazis justified their slaughters on the false notion of the inherent inferiority of the Jewish people. And it is true today insofar as the claim of inherent inferiority of the Jewish people has been touted as justifying the Hamas’ murderous invasion of Israel setting off the current conflict.

 Far too often history books in this era treat wars like conflicts among moral equals, which they almost never are. Even in the case of World War I, whereas the conflicts arose out of a somewhat more complicated set of facts, at its core was the crisis of the 19th century’s leaders of the industrial revolution running afoul of a rising labor movement. It was why three members of the same ruling family, all offspring of England’s Queen Victoria, posted as heads of state of three of Europe’s most powerful nations – England, Germany and Russia – permitted the onset of perhaps the worst slaughter of innocents in history. It wasn’t semi-resolved until two atom bombs were dropped on major Japanese population centers, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, to settle the outcome of that vast era of mass murder running from 1914 through a period that was characterized as “The Long Weekend” in the 20s and 30s, to 1945.

All of the best efforts at peace in this context have been grounded in the assertion that all racial and ethnic prejudices must be quashed in order for it to happen. That is the underlying premise of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights enacted in 1948. Quoting from an article on the subject, the Declaration “enshrines the rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. It was accepted by the General Assembly as Resolution 217 during its third session on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France. Of the 58 members of the United Nations at the time, 48 voted in favor, none against, eight abstained, and two did not vote. A foundational text in the history of human and civil rights, the Declaration consists of 30 articles detailing an individual’s “basic rights and fundamental freedoms” and affirming their universal character as inherent, inalienable, and applicable to all human beings. Adopted as a “common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,” the declaration “commits nations to recognize all humans as being born free and equal in dignity and rights” regardless of “nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other status.”

It followed on the famous “Four Freedoms” that FDR introduced in the context of America’s full entry into World War II in January 1941, that affirmed the four essential freedoms for all to include phrases familiar from the Bill of Rights, and some new ones: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Sadly, far too many Americans in this current period, led by Trump, no longer hold to these values that so many Americans died for.