It’s the age old question, and that was what I talked about at the Scottish Government’s Remembrance Day event at St. Andrew’s House in Edinburgh on Friday 8th November. I had an Air Commodore on one side of me and a Major General on the other, so mine was the only white poppy on display.

White poppies were first produced in the aftermath of the First World War, by members of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, many of whom had lost family and friends in the First World War. They wanted to hold on to the key message of Remembrance Day, which is ‘never again’.

Today, they are produced by the Peace Pledge Union and stand for three things.

Remembrance of all victims of war, including both civilians and members of the armed forces. We remember people of all nationalities. We remember those killed in wars happening now, as well as in the past. We also remember those who are often excluded from the mainstream, such as refugees and victims of colonial conflicts. White poppies challenge any attempt to glorify or celebrate war and they encourage us to question the way war is normalised and justified. They remind us of the need to resist war and its causes and of the need to seeking nonviolent solutions to conflict.

This is what I said.

It’s 106 years since the end of the most destructive war in history. You may well wonder why we’re still talking about the First World War, but there are lessons to be drawn from it, although not so much from the war itself, but from the way it ended.

The settlement imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles was a punitive one. Understandably, the French and the British wanted revenge for the suffering the Germans had caused, but it was the unfairness of that treaty which handed Hitler the perfect scapegoat when just a few years later, the German economy completely collapsed. Some historians argue that the repercussions of that conflict’s punitive aftermath still reverberate around the world today. 

What lesson am I trying to draw? I think what I’m trying to say is that the desire for revenge is a very human instinct, but it’s one we need to learn to resist, and I’m not the first person to point that out. 

Two and a half thousand years ago, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote a play that shows how to transform a society rooted in vengeance into one shaped by justice. He called it The Oresteia, and in case you haven’t seen it, here’s the backstory.

At the end of the Trojan war, Agamemnon, the triumphant leader of the Greek army returns home, only to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, because on the eve of that war, he’d sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to win the support of the gods.

To avenge his father’s death, their son Orestes then murders his mother and promptly flees to Athens where the goddess of wisdom, Athena, puts him on trial. The arguments are strong on both sides, but in the end the jury is split, so the casting vote rests with Athena. What side does she come down on; vengeance or justice?

The desire for revenge is as old as humanity, and it’s hard to shake off, but if we continue to insist on “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, we will end up in a world full of the blind and the toothless. Vengeance is the opposite of justice. Although the Israelis and the Palestinians have plenty of reasons for what they’re doing, reason is not what we need right now. 

But let’s go back to our story. What did Athena do at the end of that trial? 

Spoiler alert – she forgave Orestes. 

The judgement of Athena may well be where the phrase, “to err is human, to forgive divine” originates, but I believe that forgiveness is a profoundly human quality. As Aeschylus showed us, civilisation depends on our ability to overcome our desire for revenge and learn to forgive, because forgiveness is the only way we can break the endless cycle of violence. 

We saw an example of that a year ago, when the 85-year-old Israeli peace activist Yocheved Lifshitz was released from captivity in Gaza. As she gripped the hand of one of her Hamas captors, she looked him in the eye and said, “Shalom”. Peace be upon you. 

Arabic and Hebrew use almost the same word in greeting – Salaam and Shalom. It means “peace be upon you”. It’s a tiny difference in pronunciation, but a tragic difference for humanity.

Yocheved Lifshitz and her husband Oded have an interesting backstory. Their fight for peace began after the 1967 Arab Israeli war that put more than a million Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and their efforts resulted in the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982.

Today, Oded is still a captive in Gaza, but as their daughter Sharone told the NYT earlier this year, “My father had a very developed sense of justice. 

He didn’t just have ideals about building bridges between nations. Two weeks before he was taken hostage, he was still driving Palestinians who were ill to hospitals in Israel and East Jerusalem. He really believed in our shared humanity and in doing what you can.”

Yocheved and Oded give me hope. Now more than ever, we need to look beyond our differences to the things that unite us, and the most important of those is our shared humanity.

Shalom, salaam. Peace be upon you.