THE PRINCE OF PEACE, OR OF DARKNESS? Steven Den Beste has an interesting rumination on the nature of peace:

I want a dark flashlight, please. I want a lamp I can put in a room and turn on and it will make the room dark... Where can I buy that, please? Sorry, not for sale, not even physically possible. To make a room dark, you must find and get rid of all sources of light. But as long as there are any sources of light in the room, it won't be dark.
I would like to buy some peace, please. Where can I buy that? Sorry, to get peace, you have to stop all conflicts, and that means you have to find and remove all the reasons why those involved were willing to fight.

And on the basis of war:

Whatever that reason was to start the war in the first place, it is going to be strong enough to restart it, unless that reason was dealt with in the meantime. In the 1970's they ran into that in Lebanon. The various factions were shelling each other and turning what was once considered the most beautiful modern city in the mid-East into a bombed out wreck, and some western do-gooder would come in and negotiate a cease fire. And the shooting would stop.
For maybe 24 or 48 hours. And then the combat would start again, slowly but with rising ferocity, and within a week they'd be back to "normal". This happened again and again. Over a period of months there was cease-fire after cease-fire, and none of them held. (It ended when one of the do-gooders got kidnapped and held for ransom. After that, no more do-gooders tried to negotiate cease fires.)
The problem was that to the western do-gooder, "peace" was itself the goal, and the way to get it was for everyone to stop shooting. But for those involved in the war, peace was not the goal. And the ceasefire did indeed bring peace but it didn't deal with the underlying grievance which started the war in the first place. So they would start shooting again.
We got a guy in Israel right now trying to get a cease fire between the Israelis and Palestinians. Will he succeed? He might. But it won't last. Both sides would like peace, but they also want more than that, and a simple ceasefire won't give it to them: land. The Israelis have it, the Palestinians want it, and there isn't enough of it for both of them (in their opinion). The Palestinians started this round of the Intifada for a reason, and a cease fire won't satisfy them. (If they had only wanted peace, they wouldn't have started the Intifada in the first place.)
The [pro-"peacemaking" advocate] is making the same mistake that the do-gooders did in Beirut, and assuming that peace itself is what both sides in any given conflict crave. So you can get peace just by stopping the fighting. But if it were possible to have dealt with the deeper issues without fighting, they wouldn't have begun fighting [in] the first place.

Well said.