Walter Benjamin wrote on violence and the role of police in democracies in a famous article published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 1921:

And though the police may, in particulars, appear the same everywhere, it cannot finally be denied that in absolute monarchy, where they represent the power of a ruler in which legislative and executive supremacy are united, their spirit is less devastating than in democracies, where their existence, elevated by no such relation, bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence.

Is resolution of conflict possible when based entirely on non-violence? No, says Benjamin, because non-violence cannot lead to a legal contract.

For the latter, however peacefully it may have been entered into by the parties, leads finally to possible violence. It confers on each party the right to resort to violence in some form against the other, should he break the agreement. Not only that; like the outcome, the origin of every contract also points toward violence.

Indeed, the talmudic story about an inconclusive struggle between the Hegelian-like, fierce, divinely-inspired rabbi Eliezer and his enemy, the prudential majority leader rabbi Jose, inclines to that same view, with the singular notion that non-contractual agency (Eliezer’s and his recourse to divine intervention and voicing) is potentially more violent, ab origine, and more threatening to the whole community. It would be unjust in its ends, in other words, whereas the community’s authority, arrived at by compact, persuasion, and a certain amount of twisting of evidence, is unjust in its means. When W. Benjamin writes about violence as ground for lawmaking, for instance revolutionary violence at the root of modern parliaments, is this idea any different from sacrificial views of history such as are found in the Aqedah story, or its variants in the story of Simeon ben Shetaḥ and Jesus?

Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows the use of unalloyed means of agreement.

Are we to understand that Benjamin agrees with the Hannah Arendt of The human condition that forgiveness is a great invention but impossible? All one can hope for is a refined peace found at many removes (if one is lucky to be born in, or make it to, the right social stratum) from violent enforcements, but nonetheless enforced.