Amid war, civilians’ power of innocence

From Gaza to Ukraine to Sudan, individuals lay the ground for peace through quiet acts of caring.

The Monitor's View

Asma Mustafa, a Palestinian English teacher in Gaza, has been dislocated three times by war during the four months since a brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. She and her family now live in a tent in Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city, amid other displaced families. Her circumstances have only strengthened her resolve to practice her profession.

“I look at the children around me and think of them as a treasure,” she told Middle East Eye, explaining why she gathers eager young learners each day despite the makeshift conditions. “They should never stop learning.” When classes end, the children often linger and play.

Rafah is now the latest focus of intense diplomacy to end the war in Gaza to prevent greater humanitarian harm and end the threat of Hamas to Israel. Those efforts hinge on finding a balance between Israel’s right to defend itself and the imperatives of international law to protect innocent life. But the quiet, often unseen work of people like Ms. Mustafa reflects something different: the healing impact of preserving innocence during war.

That is about something more than sheltering childhood from the emotional or physical trauma of conflict. Innocence, writes anthropologist Miriam Ticktin, “helps to create a pure space for humanity” rooted in sincerity and dignity. It “intimately shapes why and how we should care” about one another. Its resilience is evident even in the world’s most difficult wars.

In Sudan, for example, where a civil war has displaced more than 5.5 million people in less than a year, youth groups have set up networks to distribute humanitarian supplies, challenge disinformation, and care for their society’s most vulnerable people. Their work is grounded in sacrifice and an adherence to the principle of nonviolence, Ahmed Osman, a youth leader, told the United States Institute of Peace.

Last week, the exiled Iranian singer Dara released a rendition of a beloved Israeli song entitled “The Eucalyptus Grove.” It spread rapidly across social media in Iran and rattled the regime in Tehran. Moved by the song’s beauty, Dara recorded it to express the “love and respect” the Iranian people have for Israelis. “It’s incorrect to say that the Iranians hate Israel,” he told Haaretz. “The serious distress can be felt in my voice.” But he added that the song “was pure and clean.”

In a Stanford University webinar last week, Mohammad Darawshe, an Israeli Arab scholar, shared accounts of Arab citizens of Israel who, during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, “remembered their humanity and not their ethnicity.” That reflects a shared sentiment revealed in a recent poll he conducted. While nearly a third of Arab and Jewish Israelis have lost trust in the other since the start of the war in Gaza, 83% of Arabs and 71% of Jews remain willing to work or study together.

During war, “happiness hides in minutiae,” wrote Pavlo Matyusha, a Ukrainian writer who joined the armed forces when Russia invaded his country two years ago, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Such glimmers of innocence may more often go unrecorded. But to the extent that they counter hatred, aggression, and fear, they prepare the way for peace.