There are words I wish the human race would decide to forget. Not just the words. but the ancient emotions behind them. We could start with retaliation, retribution, and revenge.
People stuck in this retrograde mindset stop looking for a way out of conflicts. They simply react, without sympathy or creative imagination. There's no motion forward, just an eternal back and forth, us versus them. Each says the others are subhuman, evil, and deserve whatever they get.
With terrible recent atrocities and war crimes fresh in our thoughts--with hostages and constant bombings as rumor and propaganda add still more outrage--it becomes ever harder to maintain one's balance. As Mohandas Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Blindness results in generational feuds like the Hatfields and the McCoys, or ethnic conflicts lasting centuries.
A desire for revenge affects how we treat society's transgressors. Among all the developed nations, ours has the highest proportion of its members in prison.
Even in America, a former president has promised revenge on those who opposed him--when (if) he is elected again.
Today's very big dilemma--dangerous for the world and heartbreaking--is an impasse between nations, based on the long territorial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians they displaced. Year after year, Israelis settle more land once belonging to Palestinians, and Palestinians are crowded into less and less space.
The inability to negotiate, to compromise, to find a fair solution has led to tragedies for generation after generation, with civilians the most frequent victims.
No matter who begins the hostilities, there are always more Palestinian casualties than Israeli ones. Each and every individual of either group is an infinite loss.
Many Israelis and American Jews have protested Israel's injustices in the Occupied Territories. Scores of Israeli-Palestinian organizations have worked toward peace. But Israel's far-right leaders seem uninterested in pursuing solutions.
Still another idea we need to jettison is collective guilt, followed by collective punishment. We ran across this unfair practice in school when the teacher said, "Somebody took Johnny's lunch. Until they confess, everybody will stay inside at recess." All suffer for what one person did. Teacher assumes we all know who did it. But we don't.
It is vastly more serious to punish an entire civilian population for the actions of a fanatic organization hiding in their midst. Collective punishment is, in fact, a war crime.
Gazans voted for Hamas back in 2006; many saw the alternative party as corrupt. Half the current population in Gaza is under age 19 and didn't vote. Others in Gaza are elderly, injured, or pregnant women. Most adults are not involved in politics--they've been too busy trying to survive economically.
Another false idea--that the people of the Middle East are always fighting--only adds to pessimism and paralysis.
The Middle East is not unique. Battles have been going on somewhere in the world for at least 4,000 years. For instance, for centuries during the Warring States Period in ancient China, seven kingdoms vied for dominance in brutal wars. Every ancient empire grew by making war on smaller kingdoms or tribes to bring them into the imperial fold.
Yet for many centuries, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived side by side peacefully in the Mideast. Jews were safe from the persecution they often suffered in Christian Europe.
And something important besides wars was happening in ancient times. Between the Old and New Testaments, an era called the Axial Age (8th to 3rd century BCE) saw the appearance of a number of great philosophical and spiritual leaders. They brought a greater sense of transcendence and an increase in the value of human life.
This breakthrough in consciousness included the Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Hebrew prophets, the originators of the Upanishads; Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Plato; the "Hundred Schools" of ancient Chinese philosophy, Mahavira (Jainism), Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu (Taoism). Their ideas still form a basis for modern ethical understandings, influencing Christianity and other beliefs.
By the name "Christian" we must suppose that a person follows the teachings of Christ, rather than the customs of people living 1,000 years earlier as depicted in the Old Testament. Even then, "an eye for an eye" was meant to restrict compensation to the value of a loss. Except for murder, the Bible allowed monetary payment (kofer) instead of bodily punishment, as did other nations of the time.
Whatever our faith, we are all humans and we want no more atrocities! No more war crimes! I hope against hope that by the time this is published, people of every belief will have recovered their basic humanity. We must follow the thorny path to a just peace.
Coralie Koonce is a writer living in Fayetteville, and the author of "Little Handbook of Arguments."