Transforming Conflict: Moral Outrage Should Lead us to the Moral High Ground
By James O’Dea
Our bodies naturally fire up intense indignation when we see innocent civilians slaughtered in war. I cannot erase the image of Palestinian children blown up as they played on the beach or scores of families whose homes had been decimated then killed by rocket fire into schools they were sheltering in. I feel a similar mix of horror and outrage at the downing of a civilian plane over Ukraine and the stunningly callous way the crash site was blocked to international response teams.
Getting inside our solar plexus, our heart and mind, moral outrage shakes us at the roots. In an almost primitive way it sounds the alarm that something is desperately wrong. That's its job: to wake us up and demand a response. But if we're not careful our moral fury can add more fuel to the fire. It can drive us away from cultivating understanding and into the very corner where the conflict itself is stuck in an incendiary mix of mistrust, hostility and partisan blindness. From there being on the side of the righteous feeds the illusion that you're actually doing something about the conflict. As quickly as moral outrage can alert us to the violation of primary moral principles it can take us down a path of taking sides in a conflict rather than being the energy boost needed to transform the conflict.
Let's go back to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian people have been under occupation for a very long time now and the people of Gaza have been under an inhuman siege for a decade. This is a morally untenable position for Israel to be in. Hamas represents the view that this injustice gives them moral license to use violence. Given Israel's history and the victimization of Jews any threat of violence pushes it into a corner where it responds disproportionately. Israel carries in its psyche one of humanity’s deepest wounds of collective trauma: a wound that will only heal in an atmosphere of safety. Any time Hamas fires rockets at Israel, people who end up suffering most are the Palestinian civilians. Continuously bringing so much death on your own people and having no impact on the transformation of the conflict is equally morally untenable; in fact Hamas loses the moral high ground by doing so.
The moral high ground requires the ending of the siege of Gaza, an immediate halt to building settlements, the full realization of Palestinian independence and an end to attacks on Israel. Threatening Israel will only trigger its wounds and lead to more catastrophic consequences. Supporting any form of violent resistance to Israeli domination is completely futile and is therefore a ruinous approach.
So I ask you to channel your moral outrage into support and encouragement for any and every kind of warm, creative, spiritual, artistic, entrepreneurial, humanitarian and dialogic connections between Israelis and Palestinians. There is so much underway in this regard; let us multiply such efforts a thousandfold. Out of such contacts the future will be born, and the leaders who trust each other will arise. They are assuredly waiting in the wings with truly visionary solutions.
Visionary solutions include a confederation between Gaza and Egypt and between the West Bank and Israel. Seemingly unimaginable now, what will emerge will be an economic union that will include the entire eastern Mediterranean region known as the Levant and beyond. And it is indeed in Jerusalem, whose name means Peace upon Peace, that Islam, Judaism and Christianity will experience a new prophetic charism to celebrate the day of lasting peace.
For the moral high ground does not waste the seeds that are planted in it but it demands that they be nurtured by a daily sprinkling of love, warmed by the rays of a penetrating imagination and tended by a passionate purposefulness. I know we can wake up these days and feel we are collectively sliding back into hell but then we get up, go out into the garden and drop to our knees in awe for what it means to tend peace on Earth in the time of the Great Turning.
James O'Dea is award-winning author of Cultivating Peace. He is lead faculty for the Shift Network’s acclaimed global "Peace Ambassador Training". He has conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the world for many years. He is former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He is a member of The Evolutionary Leaders group and is on several advisory boards such as The Peace Alliance and Kosmos Journal. His next book The Conscious Activist—where activism meets mysticism will be released in December 2014. James is also a mystic who is passionate about global transformation and has a special interest in Meher Baba’s evolutionary vision and in Sufism. He is followed extensively in social media and lectures widely. James grew up in Ireland and England, has seen war and human rights violations in a number of the world’s hotspots and currently resides in the visionary community of Crestone in Colorado.
Catalyst is produced by The Shift Network to feature inspiring stories and provide information to help shift consciousness and take practical action. To receive Catalyst twice a month, sign up here.
This article appears in: 2014 Catalyst, Issue 16: Summer of Peace - Bold Visions
