[[link removed]]

‘IT’S TIME TO GIVE PEACE ANOTHER CHANCE’: THOUSANDS GATHER FOR
ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE CONFERENCE IN TEL AVIV  
[[link removed]]


 

Linda Dayan
July 2, 2024
Haaretz
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ 'Its Time: The Great Peace Conference' an arena was filled with
hope for the future for Israelis and Palestinians. 'This homeland is
bleeding,' one Palestinian speaker said, 'and if we don't stop it now,
we'll all be on the way to collective suicide' _

Thousands of attendees shine their lights in solidarity at 'The Great
Peace Conference' in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, July 1. (Haaretz),

 

Two hundred and sixty-eight days into Israel's war with Hamas,
thousands of Israelis queued at the entrance Tel Aviv's Menora
Mivtachim Arena on Monday night, waiting to enter an event called
"It's Time: The Great Peace Conference." The rally was organized by a
confederation of some 50 organizations and individuals from Israel's
left and pro-peace camp, with a message that revolved around the
arena's LED screens: "It's time to reach a deal. To stop the war. To
make peace."

 
Attendees enter the conference, Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday.  (Haaretz)

The attendees represented a mixture of organizations, from Peace Now
and Breaking the Silence
[[link removed]] to
the anti-judicial overhaul protest groups. Some wore shirts reading
"Bring them home now," a call for a deal to return the hostages to
Israel; others depicted watermelons, a stand-in for the Palestinian
flag, which Israel's police largely prohibit waving. A group of high
schoolers in hijabs toted iced coffees, and a man in red and yellow
Buddhist monk robes climbed over the barriers into the orchestra
section to greet friends.

 
Attendees gather at Tel Aviv's Menora Mivtachim Arena for "The Great
Peace Conference," Monday, July 1.  (Haaretz)
The speaker lineup was similarly diverse. It featured Israelis who
lost family to Hamas' onslaught in southern Israel and Palestinians
who lost family to Israeli air strikes in Gaza. A woman in a Jewish
headscarf recited a prayer for mothers beside her friend, an observant
Muslim, who repeated it in Arabic.

Screens on either side of the stage provided English, Arabic and
Hebrew subtitles for the speakers, and sign language interpreters
translated the Hebrew and Arabic as it was spoken. In one video
presented to the crowd, former generals and security officials
endorsed peace as the only viable path to safety; in another,
Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem gave their blessing
to the event.

 
Speakers make a joint blessing at the Peace Conference in Tel Aviv,
Monday, July 1.  (Haaretz)
"Our mutual goal here is many different organizations and movement is
to build together a peace camp in Israel," Alon-Lee Green,
co-director of Standing Together,
[[link removed]] one
of the groups that organized the conference, told Haaretz. "I'm not
even saying to rebuild. I'm talking about building from this from the
beginning – a peace camp that is grounded in reality. And in
reality, millions of Palestinians are living under violent military
control.

"Millions of Jews are living with no safety, not just in the south and
the north; it is unsafe for people to imagine that they'll keep living
on this land. And in this reality, we also need to recognize the
hegemony, and the hegemony is of the Israeli government, the Israeli
military, and we must be able to look at it and to face it. So what
we're trying to do is to build a new camp in the Israeli society, a
peace camp that is equal for Palestinians and Jews, and a peace camp
that is courageous enough to not do the mistakes of the ones of the
90s and the beginning of the 2000s."

 
Maoz Inon, right, attends the conference in Tel Aviv, Monday, July 1.
 (Haaretz)
Maoz Inon, whose parents were killed 
[[link removed]]in
the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, was one of the key organizers of
the rally. "On my journey, I learned that hope isn't something you
lose, or something you find, or something that you wait for until it
finds you. Hope is something you make," he told the crowd.

Rula Hardal, a Palestinian from Peki'in who now lives in Ramallah,
presented a dire forecast: She said that she and the Jewish activists
she shared the stage with may have different opinions on particular
issues, but they have a commonality. "We all share the same space
between the Jordan River and the sea, that we, Palestinians and
Israelis, Jews and Arabs, call a homeland," she said "But this
homeland is bleeding. Spirits of vengeance and bloodshed hover over
it, and if we don't stop it now, we'll all be on the way to collective
suicide."
 
Attendants and activists at the peace conference in Tel Aviv, Monday,
July 1.  (Haaretz)
The event also made room for up-and-coming leadership, bringing young
activists to the stage. One was Yanal Jabarin, a journalist from
Jerusalem, who recounted his harrowing experience in January at a
right-wing rally calling for the resettlement of Gaza.
[[link removed]]

He told Haaretz that this event is something of an antidote to the
messaging coming from the far-right government. "In this show of force
we have here, the thousands of people who came here, it doesn't matter
what your opinion is on 'the day after,' or whether you believe in two
states or one, we just have to say that there's a side that stands
against all of this fascism and all of this racism and messages about
transferring the Palestinian people anywhere."

 

The crowd at 'The Great Peace Conference,' Tel Aviv, Monday, July 1.
 (Haaretz)
Another young leader was Josh Drill, an expat from New Jersey who
found his way to activism after serving as an IDF officer in Hebron.
"The amount of injustice and suffering from so many sides, and from so
many different perspectives, really pushed me to understand that I'm
going to be a part of this peace movement that's going to change the
reality on the ground," he told Haaretz.

 
Activist Josh Drill speaks at the conference, Tel Aviv, Israel.
 (Haaretz)
"We cannot accept this cycle of bloodshed, we cannot accept the
current reality. It's just not livable for anyone. And I think that
the clear understanding that the Israelis and Palestinians are here to
stay, no one is going anywhere. We need to understand how we can live
amongst ourselves as Israelis, and also Israelis and Palestinians.
Because if we don't, the cycle of bloodshed will just continue and
more lives will be lost."

Elana Kaminka spoke of her son, Yannai, who was killed by Hamas
terrorists on October 7 
[[link removed]]while
protecting his soldiers as a platoon commander at the Zikim Base. "We
have three more children, and the way that things are going now, and
that people want to continue living in a consistent state of war,
isn't acceptable to us," she said backstage. "We lost one son, we
understand the pain that that involves. And for my other three
children, I don't accept that there's no other option, that there's no
other alternative. I refuse to accept that, and I don't accept it for
Palestinians, and I don't accept it for Israelis, we all deserve a
better future."

 
Elana Kaminka, right, the mother of a soldier who was killed on
October 7, speaks at the rally, Tel Aviv, Monday, July 1.  (Haaretz)
In speeches and private discussions, particular themes and messages
reemerged. Both Israelis and Palestinians have a claim to the land,
and must find ways to live with each other upon it; there must be a
sea change in Israeli and Palestinian society's perception of peace,
security, self-determination and the other; enough of our parents,
children and friends have died to this cycle of violence.

 
Professor Yuval Noah Harari speaks at the conference, Tel Aviv.
 (Haaretz)
"War isn't a law of nature – it is a human choice," said Prof.
Yuval Noah Harari 
[[link removed]]in
his keynote speech. "And at any moment, it is possible to make a
different choice, and start to make peace. True, we have tried to make
peace in the past, and we weren't good at it. So what? We haven't been
that good at making war, either, which doesn't prevent us from making
another one, and another one. All these wars have led us to the abyss.
It's time to give peace another chance."

Despite the roaring cheers of the crowd, something felt a bit empty.
It is not the stadium, whose seats were almost fully booked, but
perhaps the fact that it was in a stadium, an enclosed room, in the
first place. The participants had all bought tickets; they were a
choir being preached to. "It's an event for us, to make us feel good,"
one girl told another in the stairwell. "To make us feel like we're on
the right side."

 
Thousands attend the peace conference, Tel Aviv, Israel.  (Haaretz)
When asked about this, Jabarin said that it seems the organizers had
already considered this aspect. "It's going to be livestreamed and
there's a lot of media here, so any message spoken here will make its
way to people around the world, not just in Israel, so it'll have an
impact." And, he added, although the audience belongs mostly to the
left, Israel's left has long been fractured – something that has
cost it elections.

"There's a broad spectrum of people [here], between Balad voters for
the most left-wing Palestinian, [Israeli leftist party] Hadash, even
the National Unity Party and Benny Gantz. There's a big chance that we
have something in common, this whole audience. So it's important for
us to work together as a united community on 'the day after' and not
argue over petty things, because that's what we've been arguing over
for 70 years. Now is the time, because we see that the other side is
already organized. It knows what it wants. We also need to know what
we want, and we need to work together."

 
The crowd at the peace conference, Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, July 1.
 (Haaretz)
After about three hours of speakers and musical guests, the attendees
started to make their ways out of the arena. Ibrahim Abu Ahmad, one
of the hosts of the Third Narrative podcast
[[link removed]],
lingered to talk to friends. "I think it was sort of a support group
to all of us to know that we're not alone," he said of the conference,
which he described as beautiful and moving. "But maybe the next step
will be to be in the masses, to not just say it in a closed
auditorium, but to go and call it out on the streets to the entire
country."

He added that in the 1990s, about two thirds of both the Israeli and
Palestinian populations believed in peace – but that fraction is
down to less than a third. "We need to continue and push it more and
more and more," he said.

 
A man holds up peace signs at the conference in Tel Aviv.  (Haaretz)

"I always say that these people didn't vanish, they didn't all die,
they didn't disappear. They lost hope. And if they lost hope, they can
regain hope, and new people can also gain hope. And that happened
right after the First Intifada, when everybody thought that there was
never going to be peace out of nowhere. Somehow, we started to talk
about peace. So we can do that again," Abu Ahmad said.

"But maybe this time, not to let the extremists take control because
back then they did everything they can to prevent peace. And
unfortunately, they succeeded. We saw the worst terror attacks at the
time in the 90s during Oslo and you know, one radical Israeli killed
the Israeli prime minister. Peace died, then we can't let that happen
again."

[LINDA DAYAN is a Haaretz correspondent covering Israeli society,
culture and the Jewish world.]

* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Ceasefire
[[link removed]]
* Israeli peace movement
[[link removed]]
* Israeli politics
[[link removed]]
* Israeli left
[[link removed]]
* West Bank
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Rafah
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Israelis
[[link removed]]
* Arab-Israelis
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* IDF
[[link removed]]
* Hostages
[[link removed]]
* Hamas
[[link removed]]
* Benjamin Netanyahu
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Palestine
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]