CrossFireArabia
The Things They Never Chose
There are certain truths we do not need to be taught.
When we are thirsty, we look for water.
When we are hungry, we look for food.
When we are afraid, we look for safety.
And when the heart grows tired of darkness, it instinctively turns toward light.
These are not political ideas.
They are among the oldest truths of being human.
So I often find myself asking:
When are we allowed to ask for peace?
My answer is simple:
Always.
But perhaps it is precisely when the world grows darkest that the right to speak of peace becomes most sacred.
There is a particular kind of shame in watching an innocent human being lose their dignity because of the colour of their skin, the faith into which they were born, the name they carry, or the place in which history happened to place them.
A place they did not choose.
A history they did not write.
A burden they did not create.
What have we become when a human being must first prove that they belong before we grant them the right to be safe?
And what have we become when the suffering of another person is judged according to which side they were born on?
Perhaps humanity begins with a simpler question:
Not “Who are they?”
But:
“What is happening to them?”
A child does not enter this world knowing whom to hate.
A child does not know borders.
A child does not inherit our maps, our arguments, our wounds, or the stories we tell ourselves about who deserves more and who deserves less.
We teach them these things.
We give them our fears and sometimes call them history.
We give them our divisions and sometimes call them identity.
We give them our hatred and ask them to carry it into the future.
But why should a child inherit a debt they never borrowed?
Why should the innocent pay for the failures of those who came before them?
There is something almost sacred in the simple fact that a child wants what every other child wants:
to laugh,
to play,
to feel safe,
to wake tomorrow.
Perhaps that is why the sight of children finding a moment of peace in the middle of war moves me so deeply.
Not because it makes the war beautiful.
But because it reminds me that life, even wounded, continues to reach for life.
And I cannot look at such a moment without feeling both hope and shame.
Hope—because something in the human spirit still refuses to disappear.
Shame—because we have allowed a world to exist in which a child must search for moments of safety at all.
War destroys more than buildings.
It distorts memory.
It teaches fear.
It passes wounds from one generation to another.
And eventually, if we are not careful, it teaches children to inherit the hatred of people they have never met.
That may be one of humanity’s deepest failures:
turning the wounds of yesterday into the inheritance of tomorrow.
Peace, therefore, is not weakness.
It is not surrender.
It is not forgetting.
Peace is the courage to refuse the endless inheritance of suffering.
It is the belief that justice does not require us to abandon compassion, and that dignity cannot be reserved for those who look like us, pray like us, speak like us, or come from the same piece of earth.
We may disagree about almost everything.
We may carry different scriptures, different philosophies, different memories, or no faith at all.
Yet surely there remains one place where we can meet:
in the recognition that another human life is as precious as our own.
Perhaps this is the oldest prayer there is.
Not a prayer belonging to one religion.
Not a prayer belonging to one nation.
Not even necessarily a prayer that requires belief in God.
Simply this:
May no child have to be afraid.
May no human being be humiliated for the circumstances of their birth.
May no generation be condemned to inherit the hatred of another.
And may we become wise enough to understand that war cannot ultimately end war.
Only peace can.
Not the peace of silence imposed by fear,
but the peace that allows people to breathe, to remember their humanity, and to imagine a future that does not resemble their past.
Hope is not the opposite of reality.
Hope is the refusal to let reality become an excuse for surrendering our humanity.
And perhaps that is what I see when I look at children beside the sea.
A small, almost fragile reminder that beneath all our histories, identities, borders and beliefs, we are still human beings searching for the same ancient things:
water when we are thirsty,
food when we are hungry,
safety when we are afraid,
and a little light when the world becomes dark.
Maybe peace begins there.
In that recognition.
In that refusal to look away.
In the quiet decision that the suffering of another human being must never become ordinary.
And perhaps, from that small place inside us
that war has not yet reached,
hope begins.
Then hope.
Then hope again.
Because the world, with all its differences,
does not need more people who know how to make war.
It needs those who will remind us, quietly and steadfastly,
that peace is not merely a beautiful dream…
it is the human right to remain human.
