The wind is blowing in Jerusalem. My first tulip has bloomed yellow. The first white lily sways its head. I have lost count of how many sirens we have had.

We are at war with Iran.

The day finally came — the one foretold by the Doomsday Clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square, counting down the minutes to Israel’s destruction.

Israelis do not want war.

And yet the world accuses us of starting this one. An American Jewish author shared that her young son felt personally blamed by a non-Jewish friend who said he was upset the United States joined the war because of Israel.

“Israelis love war,” another Jewish friend is told by her project manager in Italy.

Every siren shakes me awake from pretending the world is as peaceful as the yellow tulip rising like the sun in my narrow herb box.

Who likes sending their children to war?

Sometimes I feel people do not understand Jews or the Middle East. Sometimes we even struggle to understand ourselves, until we are reminded of our Jewish story.

A sober reminder of this came at an event I was invited to — one focused on working toward peace in the Middle East. On a balmy summer evening, I arrived, with my dear friend Joshua, at a trendy apartment in Tel Aviv. The crowd was mainly Jewish and Israeli. There was Middle Eastern food, chicken and rice, stuffed vine leaves, cooked by an Arab woman from Jaffa. Wine flowed. The sun dipped into darkness and the evening’s discussion began.

We were introduced to a woman with flowing white-blonde hair, a halo around her shining face. She had been born in Palestine and had left as a young adult. Her life’s mission was to activate peace in human hearts.

My ears perked. Activate peace. I was all for that.

But then she began to speak with prophetic enthusiasm. Her message was that we should not fight for peace.

My cheeks flushed. I imagined activating peace and calling my son home from the warfront in Lebanon. Calling all our soldiers home so there would be no empty places at the dinner table.

But then what happens when Israel is attacked? She did not speak about that.

Under her supervision, we were split into groups of three to learn how to listen to one another. My group included a young Jewish Italian woman volunteering in Israel to help create peace and an older French man.

The young woman spoke first. She described visiting the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem.

“I saw Jewish families, Haredi families, Arab families walking together among the animals,” she said. “Seeing that gave me hope for peace.”

The older man spoke next. He said he was pained by the walls he sees in Jerusalem, separating Arabs. They make him despair.

I told them: Because I am an Iraqi Jew.

Jews were exiled from Judea to Babylonia over 2,600 years ago — this is where my family comes from. But in 1951, over 120,000 Iraqi Jews, including all of my grandparents and my father, were forced to leave due to Iraqi pan-Arab nationalism and antisemitism. They arrived in refugee camps in Israel, the only country that would take them. Nearly one million Jews fled or were expelled from Arab lands in the 20th century, most finding refuge in Israel.

I told them, I grew up in Sydney, Australia, where I had an adopted third grandfather. His name was Ziggy, a short bald Czech Holocaust survivor with river-blue eyes. His wife Esther and his five children were murdered in Auschwitz.

I told them, hand on heart, that hatred lives in our hearts. Our hearts are split in two — right and left, good and bad.

Evil is real. Unless we confront it, in the world and in ourselves, there can be no peace.

By the end, I was shaking and in tears. I was grateful to have Joshua gently walk me out.

I had just shared Jewish pain — and what much of the Western world prefers not to see.

War is not always the opposite of peace.

Sometimes we must fight to defend peace and safety.

Growing up, one of the most tragic images of the 20th century for me was Neville Chamberlain in 1938, waving the paper he had signed with Adolf Hitler, proclaiming, “Peace for our time.”

Sometimes the world forgets it was not only six million Jews who died in the Second World War, but roughly 70 – 85 million people.

Appeasement is the wish for peace without confronting evil.

The problem is that evil is rarely obvious at the beginning. It often presents itself as truth, even as moral necessity. Nazi propaganda declared, “Die Juden sind unser Unglück” — “The Jews are our misfortune.” Decades later, Iran’s revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini described Israel as “a cancerous tumor that must be removed.” By the time the world understands the danger, it is often too late.

In the Middle East those wheels have been turning for a long time. They gave birth to October 7th.

More than 1,200 Israelis were murdered, families burned in their beds, and 251 people taken hostage into Gaza by an army of Hamas terrorists backed by the Iranian regime. Waves of civilians followed, crossing the border and joining the violence and looting.

Hamas’s founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction and cites a hadith declaring that the Day of Judgment will come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.

How do you activate peace in hearts filled with such hatred?

Unexpectedly, reassurance about the justice of this war comes from my friend in Baghdad — an Arab Muslim man.

“What is happening between the USA, Israel, and Iran is not about peace,” he messages me. “It is about fighting between good and evil.”

He tells me Iraqis living under Iran’s proxy grip worry that America will not finish the job. “We need to change their political regime,” he writes. “To turn the page on this barbaric regime forever.”

My friend in Baghdad does not have the luxury of activating peace either.

He understands what we are fighting for.

What I would like to explain to peace activists is the meaning of the Hebrew word for peace: שלום — Shalom. Shalom is not simply the absence of conflict. It means whole — when broken pieces are brought together and made complete.

Each of us carries a broken piece of the human story.

Meanwhile, I glimpse my yellow tulip through my kitchen window and, in the silence between sirens, feel the possibility of the world in my heart.

A vision blooming for the day after war.

To plant, along with my friend in Baghdad, peace and wholeness in divided, broken hearts.

This post first appeared on Sarah Sassoon’s Substack Picking Lemons 

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