What Does Peace Mean?

It was December 2024. I was rushing and click-clacking my heels in Downtown Miami with Mauricio Schneider, Bibas family uncle, while on the phone with another hostage family member who couldn’t figure out how to get to our next meeting. Florida was a vital arena for hostage advocacy at the end of Biden’s term, the sweet spot when the incoming Trump team and the Biden administration had no choice but to cooperate. As the light changed and Mauricio and I crossed the street, phone to my ear, I turned my head to the car with Virginia license plates waiting for us to cross and saw my Alcoholic Ex in the driver’s seat, jaw-dropped and frozen as the humid air flawlessly swept my hair up as if I had paid it to. Neither of us could believe it, and neither of us said, or did, anything. At least I looked good.

It had been two years since the last time we’d seen each other. He had walked me to my car and kissed me goodnight after I spent a whole day pretending I didn’t have one foot out of the relationship. I couldn’t understand why the universe had put us both on the same Miami street on a random Thursday, but it did dawn on me that it was the best way to run into an ex in the history of running into exes. Though that hostage family delegation trip to Florida and my cinematic run-in with Alcoholic Ex happened less than two years ago, my life and career trajectory have taken turns I never expected.

I’m part of IPF Atid and EcoPeace’s inaugural EcoPeace Ambassador Fellowship. A question from one of our summits turned my brain in all the ways I like it to be turned. They asked us to define peace, which has always tasted bland to me. Peace is passive and says nothing about what it takes to maintain it. Sure, to some it’s the goal in geopolitics. But does that mean mutually agreeing to ignore each other as you live side by side on the same border? In dating, at least, peace feels like crumbs when what you want is bilateral collaboration.

You need a reason to keep the peace that’s more than just…the peace. Ironically, in Hebrew and in Arabic, we great with peace. Shalom and Salam have the same meaning. In Colombia, we consider it the ultimate form of insult if we, as we say, “quitarle el saludo.” We have a whole concept for removing a greeting. The cold shoulder, at least in my birth country, is not considered peaceful coexistence.

Alcoholic Ex and I spent years pretending we were just friends before we officially got together. We had half a decade of memories, mostly good, and mutual friends who cheered on our relationship without any idea of what it was like behind closed doors. When we broke up, I learned he told them I had abandoned him. In reality, he broke up with me over the phone five days before my birthday. It was the best gift he ever gave me.

He wanted to stay friends. He wanted to come over and help me build furniture and, more importantly, have me come to his rescue. For us, there could be no collaborative peace, no matter how many markers of coexistence lay between us. Our friends chose who to go with in the divorce and the group fell apart. Losing that hurt more than losing him.

Those markers of coexistence become a cyclical reason to stay involved. We made up our borders. Our natural resources don’t work that way. Neither does anything else unless you want to be North Korea.

It’s easier to inspire action than to inspire a noun. That’s why negotiations and peace-building initiatives matter. You don’t need to have them over for dinner every week. You just need to know you’re working toward the same goal. You need to know the other person wants the same thing you do. After a breakup, I’ve never felt the person hoping for a friendship wanted the same thing that I did. Alcoholic Ex didn’t want to lose his emotional pacifier, the girl who would sit at AA meetings with him as he exalted her as the reason for his continued sobriety. It turns out peace can’t look like dependence, either.

People throw the word friendship around after a breakup the way people on social media post about peace. Both become a consolation prize that makes you feel like a good person without requiring any knowledge of the work it takes to build either. What’s funny is that if every person who believed we should live in peace did one thing to move us toward it, we’d be closer to it than we are now.

I didn’t trust I could rely on Alcoholic Ex. Over time, our relationship became defined by how much he relied on me. It’s unfair to blame him for trying to adjust us into a dynamic that kept the relationship going, a marker of coexistence that would make me feel too guilty to leave. After our breakup, I assigned a mutual friend to take him whatever he had left at my apartment and bring me back what few things I still had left at his. A couple of months before, I had started quietly bringing a few things back, afraid that leaving him might make him pick up the bottle. That, too, was unfair of me.

After our friend drove from the Valley to the West Side and back, his car came into my garage full to the brim with relationship paraphernalia like the Jewish Santa Claus of breakups. I thought I had just left a pair of shirts, a toothbrush, and a bottle of perfume for him to shove into an eco-friendly tote. Instead, he looked at the contents of his bedroom and put everything that reminded him of me into old Amazon boxes, leaving Jewish Santa wondering if we had been planning on moving in together. The contents included shirts of his I had worn and not worn, most of the presents I’d given him throughout the time we knew each other, and a coffee mug I would use after I spent the night. I got rid of most of it, amused to see my apartment filled with more of his belongings than I had in the first place.

I hung up the phone and slid it into my back pocket, wondering if my ex was still looking as I grabbed Mauricio’s hand and told him what had just happened. We made our way up to the boardroom full of diplomats where I was introduced with a bio I hadn’t written, but that sounded pretty impressive. I stumbled through a brief introduction before handing attention over to those who really mattered, those who had traveled the world to bring their loved ones back, and with them, a hope for peace.