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The hardest time to talk about peace is in the aftermath of something terrible. It’s just a few days since the Hamas attack on Israel and the shocking numbers of dead on both sides are rising by the day. It’s a time of anguish and anger. I have Israeli relatives and I feel it myself.

But the person who’s caught my imagination in the coverage is a thoughtful white-haired 75 year-old Canadian Israeli called Vivian Silver, who went missing on Saturday when Hamas attacked the kibbutz where she’s lived for many years. She may be dead, or it’s possible she’s being held as a hostage somewhere in Gaza.

After the 2014 war between Israel and Gaza, Vivian helped to found Women Wage Peace, a movement that has pushed for a negotiated settlement. It counts tens of thousands of supporters and works alongside the Palestinian women’s peace movement. At every Israeli election meeting they ask a simple question: what are you doing to avoid the next war?

With Gaza under siege, and Israeli tanks gathering at the border, I find myself wondering what Vivian Silver would be saying, if we could hear her voice. If she’s alive, we can perhaps imagine her terror, but we can’t know her thoughts. We do know that she’s argued that retribution keeps the cycle of violence turning. That we must listen deeply to our enemies. That all parties want freedom and security.

This simple aspiration coexists with the intractability of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the depth of the feelings it stirs, especially now. I’ve been thinking of the Mahayana Buddhist teaching that the worst fate that can befall us, is not that we suffer, but that we lose touch with compassion. A Tibetan monk who spent decades in prison once told me that of course he had hated his torturers while they were making him suffer, but he hadn’t allowed himself to forget that they were human beings who believed that what they were doing was right. That knowledge enabled him to maintain the perspective his Buddhist practice demanded.

There is no possible justification for what the Hamas attackers did to Israeli citizens, but I fear what is coming for people trapped in Gaza. If the message of peace is important, it remains so when it seems most untenable, when it seems there is no alternative to violence and when the wounds of suffering are still raw.

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