The Fourth of July: A Peacemaker’s View of America’s War
By Dan Cohen, PhD
This 4th of July, I look back on a life spent watching humanity’s suffering unfold, while searching for the remedy for the fires of violence and hostility that burn holes in the heart. What I have learned from a lifetime of seeking peace amidst conflict is that what heals is to include everyone and everything that belongs. What harms are narratives that assign innocence to one and blame to the other.
Many of you reading this also carry a complicated and painful relationship with the ongoing war that has spread throughout the region. Some of you are Jewish, with family ties in Israel, with grandparents who survived persecution, with an intimate understanding of why a Jewish homeland feels existential. Others are Palestinian whose families lost their homes and became non-citizens on their own ancestral land. You may be afraid to speak out. Your silence is not cowardice. My heart is with you all.
In 1983-84 when I lived in Bethlehem, in Palestine, as a Jewish peacemaker. During those months, I traveled through the West Bank, meeting with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, trying to understand what it would take for the people of that land to share it.
What I witnessed during my time there was a government policy already well underway: the systematic displacement of a people, house by house, hectare by hectare, conducted under a cohesive strategy, and with a ruthlessness that was made more chilling by how disguised it remained and how vigorously it was defended.
The destruction of Gaza over the past two years is nothing new to me. It is the acceleration of a plan that long predates October 7th, a decades-long strategy, first articulated in the 1930s, to acquire all the land of the British Mandate of Palestine. The oppression of ordinary life that I witnessed in Bethlehem forty years ago has only expanded in its scale, brutality, and visibility.
A Family Legacy Shaped by War
Photo: Henry Cohen (Dan’s father) and Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog at Camp Foehrenwald, 1946. Many of the survivors became soldiers in Israel’s 1948 war.
The Alchemy of Nazism and Jewish Survivors
At the end of the war, my father Henry helped liberate concentration camps and stayed on as Director of a UN Jewish survivors’ camp in Germany. Many of the survivors he cared for went on to become the first soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces. I grew up understanding, in the most personal terms, how the crematoriums of Auschwitz transformed an entire generation. At first, it was unbearable grief. Later those descended from victims of Nazism became convinced that the ferocity of antisemitism and the right to defend against it have no limit.
There is a scene I return to often. Some years ago, I led a three-day workshop in Sweden for descendants of the White Buses, the extraordinary humanitarian mission in which Sweden sent fleets of buses, painted white with red crosses, into the heart of wartime Germany. They rescued thousands of Jewish prisoners from the camps. Those who survived settled in Sweden, had children of their own and then grandchildren. These were the participants in the workshop.
At the close of our time together, we did a collective Constellation of a long timeline. We began with ancient human origins, moved through historic epochs, through a split into Jewish and Germanic lineages. In the modern period, we stood with Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass marking the beginning of the Holocaust), the start of the War in 1939, and into the fires of Auschwitz. What we witnessed was an alchemical transformation. The Jewish representative who walked in was passive, spiritually devoted, believing in divine protection; The Nazi representative was certain of the righteousness of their mission to rid Europe of Jews. Standing in the inferno, they faced each other as mortal enemies, but then, shockingly, they wrapped around each other in a long embrace. The Jewish representative emerged as a soldier, gripping the rifle. The Nazi became a post-War German, pacified, emptied of the hunger for war. It was a striking and memorable image of how wars manufacture human alloys.
Family Constellations: Beyond Good and Evil
Alchemical Constellations
I first came to train as a facilitator because I grasped the potential of Bert Hellinger’s first principle of Constellations from Love’s Hidden Symmetry:
“The worst atrocities and injustices are committed in good conscience.”
This precise assertion, “I am doing nothing wrong,” said with genuine conviction and assurance, is the most dangerous sentence in human vocabulary. It shuts the door on acknowledging one’s own contribution to the harm. Behind it lies unrestrained permission to cause harm.
In Constellations, we neither judge nor pathologize. We ask, “Who stands behind you, blinding you from seeing reality as it is?” When we trace that question back to the parents, grandparents and older generations, the road leads to the healthy ancestors who long for us to serve the greater forces of love and life.
The alchemical moment in a Constellation is when the vibration of suffering that lives in our hearts connects with our suffering ancestors. They are witnessed and acknowledged. Healthy ancestors moved by waves of lifeforce arrive. They have many names – angels, archetypes, the light that lives beneath our suffering.
We feel the disturbance we were born into dissolve and what Emily calls the pulse of purpose and breath of abundance arise. When the entanglement that binds us to our family’s crimes, losses, or tragedies loosens, so does our need to be bound by good conscience.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the words below in February 1946, the day after standing among survivors at Zeilsheim, another Jewish survivors camp. “There is a feeling of desperation and sorrow in this camp which seems beyond expression.” From an aching heart, she famously asked:
“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
To acknowledge our own limitations and failings is not weakness. It is the very thing that makes tolerance possible. You cannot accept another person’s humanity, if you have not accepted your own. This is as true for nations as it is for individuals.
Choosing Life: The Wisdom of Harold & Maude
A Vision of Harold & Maude
In 1971, I saw the film Harold and Maude. Much to my surprise, Maude appeared as an avatar of the feminine healer in a recent Constellation. She has stayed present with me as I write this. Played by Ruth Gordon, Maude was seventy-nine years old, near the end of her life, and more alive than anyone around her. In a single brief shot, we see the numbered tattoo that tells us she is a concentration camp survivor.
Paired with privileged, morose and suicidal Harold, Maude has suffered from the worst atrocity and injustice. Close to death, she has every reason to be closed to joy. And yet right to the end, she appreciates life rather than disdaining it. She chooses to be fully alive, to reach toward others, to find beauty, to refuse the pallor of death while still breathing.
Her relationship with flowers and growing things reveals everything about how she moves through the world. She rescues them. She transplants a small tree from the cracked pavement of the city to the open floor of a forest, because, she says, everything living needs room for its roots. She meets each moment with the same question: What does life need to flourish?
The world that Emily and I move through, the people we meet in our retreats and trainings, and the entrepreneurs we mentor, are waking up to what life and the earth are asking of us.
“A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life.” ~ Maude (Harold & Maude)
