I write to you at a time when the drums of war have returned to our doorsteps once again. The sounds of sirens, missile explosions, panicking neighbors, and children crying ring louder and longer. We have been here before, last June I wrote to you from this same place of uncertainty. Our skin is thicker now, and our nerves are adapting with each passing day. Yet something about this moment feels darker than anything that came before. The US-Israeli attacks on Iran, and Iran’s inevitable retaliation, are leading us down a worrying path of violence, destruction, and death.

War exerts a profound pressure: to abandon moral clarity. Yet this is precisely the one thing worth fighting to hold onto. I often hear people weaponizing morality saying, "refugees are a normal result of war," or that death and destruction of others is a necessary collateral damage, as if war blurs the lines of morality. But it is quite the opposite. It is precisely during war that morality and ethics matter most. The moral position we choose to take reflects our responsibility towards humanity. I do recognize that it seems that evil is prevailing and the ethics of “Might is Right” seem to have infected humanity globally. But where we morally stand, and how we respond, remains our choice, and that is something war asks of us all.

We find ourselves in the season of Lent, a time that asks us not to withdraw from the world, but a time to face it honestly, and to confront the evil within it. This year I have decided to fast for 55 days along the Eastern Church, not as a dogmatic ritual performance, but as a form of physical and spiritual resistance. It is a refusal to consume what the world offers without question. In choosing restraint, even in something as physical and daily as a vegan fast, I find myself meditating on a deeper reality: God’s creation was not designed for violence. In the beginning, there was no war, no domination, no bloodshed. Adam and Eve were perhaps vegan and in harmony with all living things, life as God intended it to be.

Our current world leaders are transforming gardens into military battlefields and are justifying this war with a twisted narrative that is accompanied by the language of violence. We hear American, Israeli and Iranian politicians manipulate people’s minds and hearts when they speak in absolutes: good and evil, us and them, strength and destruction. The more this language is repeated, the more it is absorbed. The more it is believed, the more it is embodied.

What we are experiencing is not new. Jesus was surrounded with a language that argued the belief that violence can redeem, that force can purify, and that war can bring lasting peace. This was the language of the Romans, the Crusades, the Islamic conquerors, and of the modern nation-states. It is what has been called the myth of redemptive violence. And it remains one of the most powerful lies shaping our world today. The tragedy is not only that leaders speak this way. It is that people follow. Communities absorb rhetoric. Faith is highjacked to justify it. Enemies are stripped of their humanity. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we begin to mirror the very evil we claim to resist.

As we move toward Easter, we are faced with a truth that stands in direct opposition to the language of violence. The cross exposes the bankruptcy of violence, it cannot produce life, meaning, or reconciliation. It reveals what power does when it is unchecked. Moreover, it reveals God’s response, not retaliation, nor destruction, but self-giving love. Resurrection is not God proving strength through force; it is God overturning the very philosophical system that depends on it.

Therefore, we cannot claim to follow Christ while uncritically echoing the language of war. We cannot baptize violence with theological language and call it faithfulness. We cannot speak of peace while accepting the inevitability of destruction. The call of Jesus is not to manage violence more ethically; it is to break its cycle.

This is where our faith speaks directly into the moment. Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness, hungry, alone, and vulnerable, and it was precisely towards the end of his fasting that he was tempted by the seductions of religious and political power. He refused them all. Lent and fasting are annual rituals and practices preparing ourselves to make that same refusal. To resist the pull of power, domination, and revenge. To choose, again and again, the harder and narrower path of justice and reconciliation.

This is the position Musalaha stands for. This is where reconciliation is more than an idea, but a mandate. It demands that we act, pursue justice without vengeance, confront evil without becoming it, and stand in the tension without surrendering to despair or hatred. It is costly. It is often misunderstood. But it is the only path that refuses to surrender one's humanity.

Daniel Munayer, Executive Director, Musalaha