"Peace is a paradox. Many traditions praise it and decry conflict and war. Yet in war, even ordinary people become heroes. In pursuit of peace, even heroes are often afraid to take the risk. Those who show courage in the heat of battle are celebrated. Those who take risks for peace are all too often assassinated - among them Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Anwar El-Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin. The pursuit of peace can come to seem to be a kind of betrayal. It involves compromise. It means settling for less than one would like. It has none of the purity and clarity of war, in which the issues self-defence, national honour, patriotism, pride — are unambiguous and compelling. War speaks to our most fundamental sense of identity: there is an ‘us' and a 'them' and no possibility of confusing the two. When, though, enemies shake hands, who is now the 'us' and who the 'them’? Peace involves a profound crisis of identity. The boundaries of self and other, friend and foe, must be redrawn. No wonder, then, that as Sir Henry Maine observed, 'War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.' "

— Rabbi Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to avoid the clash of civilizations (2002)

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