War in Gaza sparks a reckoning
Some Israelis and Palestinians share a deepening conviction that security means learning to live in peace under different leaders.
A youth carries palm branches as Palestinians gather in the central Gaza Strip in the hope of obtaining aid delivered through a U.S.-built pier, May 19.
Reuters
A breakdown in talks on a cease-fire in Gaza and a rift that opened over the weekend in Israel’s war Cabinet underscore a big question: how to end the war. Yet in a different direction, the contours of a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians are increasingly visible more than seven months after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
“There’s a view of a future for Israeli and Palestinian people that rejects the notion that the conflict is inevitable,” noted Allen Weiner, a senior lecturer at Stanford Law School. The basis of that view is a shared rejection of extremism and a deepening conviction in both societies that an antidote resides in democratic values.
“Our loss and our pain have made us brothers,” said Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian entrepreneur and advocate for peace. Mr. Abu Sarah and an Israeli counterpart, Maoz Inon, addressed a peace rally in Italy on Saturday.
“We cry together, and we dream together,” he told a crowd of 13,000, with Mr. Inon at his side. “We dream that the walls of ignorance, fear, and hate that divide us will fall down. Both of us lost loved ones ... but we have not lost our humanity. Our pain has led us to envision a shared future together.”
Discontentment runs high in both societies over failed leadership. Israelis gathered in protests against the current government on Saturday and again on Monday at the start of a new session of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. A poll by The Israel Democracy Institute showed last week that only 35% of Jewish Israelis and 18% of Arab Israelis are optimistic about the future of democratic rule and security in their country.
“The battlefield is not only in Gaza,” said Eitan Turgeman, an Israeli military reservist and founder of a peace organization called Tikun 2024 (tikun means “repair” in Hebrew). Ideologically conservative, Mr. Turgeman used to argue combatively on social media about politics. “I’m not doing that anymore,” he told The New York Times. “I’m challenging the way I think.”
A similar shift is unfolding among Palestinians. The latest poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in March found that support for Hamas among Palestinians in Gaza had fallen to 34% from 42% three months ago.
Beyond those parallel shifts, the greater movement of attitudes driven by the war is toward unity. Hundreds of Israeli, Palestinian, and joint civil society organizations promote models of peace based on coexistence and shared security. Tikun 2024 is just one of several started by Israeli military reservists. An Israeli podcast called “Unapologetic” strives to defuse extremism by creating “a space for compassion for acceptance and nuanced conversations” beyond hatred.
“We have two people that are inextricable,” said Masua Sagiv, a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She describes herself as Israeli, Jewish, Zionist, and pro-Palestinian. “No one is going anywhere. Neither Palestinians, neither Israel. If no one is going anywhere, that means that both people are responsible for the safety of the other.”
Hamze Awawde, a Palestinian peace builder, added, “You have to really let go of the past and forgive.”