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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I wrote this essay before the South African-born jurist and former United Nations “human rights” chief Navi Pillay, who presided over a commission that declared that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
Apparently, slandering the Jewish state leads one to earn a Nobel Peace Prize in 2026. The hits just keep on coming.
There is something darkly funny about having to explain that Jews want peace when peace is literally how we say hello.
Shalom.
We say it when we arrive and when we leave. We wish each other Shabbat shalom before the Sabbath. The traditional greeting shalom aleichem means “peace unto you,” and the response returns the same wish. Before we have asked how someone is doing, before we have discussed business or family or what we are having for dinner, we have already put peace into the conversation.
The casualness of shalom tells us something that the caricature of Jews and Israelis cannot accommodate: Peace is so deeply embedded in Jewish life that we invoke it without even thinking about it. Somehow, a people who made peace an ordinary expression of human encounter have been recast as people who find peace intolerable.
And once you notice that inversion, you begin to see how much else has been turned upside down. Jewish attachment to our indigenous homeland becomes Jewish aggression. Jewish survival becomes Jewish domination. Jewish historical memory becomes manipulation. The determination never again to be defenseless becomes evidence that Jews are dangerous.
In this telling, virtually everything Jews do to remain alive can be presented as a reason to fear us.
Consider how insistently peace appears in Jewish prayer. The priestly blessing culminates in a wish for peace. The Amidah includes a blessing asking for peace, goodness, and life. The Psalms instruct us to “seek peace and pursue it,” giving peace the force of an obligation rather than the softness of a pleasant thought. These words were woven into Jewish life long before there was an Israeli government to defend or an international audience to impress. Jews were praying for peace when nobody was particularly interested in whether we lived to see it.
What makes this painful is that Jewish longing for peace has never required much imagination to understand. A people acquainted with expulsion, persecution, and massacre hardly needs a lecture on the desirability of an uneventful life. We know the value of a door that stays on its hinges, a child who returns home, and a holiday that ends with dirty dishes instead of funerals. There is nothing abstract about peace when your family history contains the consequences of its absence.
Yet somewhere along the way, a grotesque condition attached itself to the recognition of Jewish suffering: It becomes easier to acknowledge once the Jews involved can no longer do anything about it. A murdered Jew can be mourned without making demands of the person mourning. A living Jew with the means to prevent another murder is more inconvenient. He has a border to defend, a threat to assess, and an opinion about whether sympathy will arrive in time. His survival requires more from the world than a commemorative speech.
Israel makes that inconvenience permanent. Jewish safety no longer rests entirely on the willingness of someone else to provide it. Jews possess the power to intervene in our own fate, and that power has become the center of an extraordinary suspicion. The question so often slips from whether Israel used its power wisely in a particular circumstance to whether Jewish power itself is an offense. An argument about policy becomes an indictment of the entire national project.
That distinction matters because a country can answer criticism of a decision. It cannot satisfy an accusation built around the idea that its existence is the original crime. Once Israel is cast in that role, evidence gets assigned its meaning in advance.
An Israeli concession must conceal a sinister motive. An Israeli fear must be propaganda. An Israeli account of Jewish history must be an attempt to steal someone else’s. Even the wish to remain in the country where you were born can become, when expressed by an Israeli Jew, an act requiring a geopolitical defense.
Think about the historical inversion involved. Jews maintained our attachment to Jerusalem through centuries of dispersion, carrying it in prayer, ritual, language, and memory. Now that attachment is routinely treated as though it were manufactured to justify a modern intrusion. The continuity itself becomes suspicious. We are asked to accept that the place we remembered was never meaningfully ours to remember, and that returning to it somehow proves we have no authentic relationship with it.
Jewish history is permitted to be ancient, provided it stays safely disconnected from present-day Jews.
Something similar happens to Jewish identity. We are told to return to wherever our families lived before Israel, as though the countries that expelled or persecuted Jews supplied the only legitimate addresses we could ever have. We are treated as foreigners in the Jewish homeland by people who appear remarkably uninterested in why so many Jews could not remain in the places they left. The accusation follows us across the map. Wherever Jews are, someone is prepared to explain that we properly belong somewhere else.
And then there is the inversion of peace itself. Israelis are expected to demonstrate their desire for peace through a willingness to live with dangers that their critics would never accept for their own families, never mind for themselves. The person issuing the demand gets to remain safely removed from the consequences. The Israeli parent has to decide what it means for the child sleeping down the hall.
That difference in responsibility ought to produce humility. Too often, it produces a lecture about how the parent’s fear is an obstacle to peace.
After October 7th, that lecture became unbearable. Jews watched families attacked in their homes, young people hunted at a music festival, and children and senior citizens abducted into Gaza, and then found themselves having to explain why such an event could not become a recurring condition of Israeli life.
Even grief became subject to interrogation. Before the dead were fully mourned, the living were being asked to account for the anger, fear, and resolve that followed. The demand seemed to be that Jews absorb the reality of what had happened while everyone else retained the comfort of their previous opinions.
Wanting peace does not mean agreeing to organize your life around someone else’s willingness to kill you. It does not require a mother to treat the possibility of another massacre as a reasonable price for international approval. A peace that depends on Jews accepting permanent vulnerability contains a very old arrangement beneath its reassuring vocabulary: Other people decide how much danger we must tolerate, and we are judged by how quietly we tolerate it.
Israel exists, in part, because Jewish life cannot depend on that arrangement.
Nor should Jews have to produce a résumé of exceptional goodness before our safety becomes legitimate. We should not have to list our scientists, our doctors, our charitable institutions, or our contributions to the societies in which we live. Those achievements deserve pride, but they are not admission tickets to human rights. An entirely unremarkable Jewish child has the same claim to a future as anyone else. Israel’s right to protect that future does not depend on the child someday curing a disease.
This is where the caricature does its most destructive work: It makes ordinary Jewish desires look sinister. Wanting a homeland becomes a lust for territory. Wanting secure borders becomes a hatred of outsiders. Wanting our children to inherit our language, traditions, and attachment to Israel becomes an exclusionary obsession.
Other peoples are allowed to possess a national story without defending every chapter before breakfast. Jews are asked to justify the desire to continue having one.
The Israel I love is full of people whose ambitions are far more ordinary than the mythology built around them. They want relationships, children, meaningful work, an apartment they can afford, and a table full of friends. They want to complain about traffic because traffic, God willing, is the most pressing problem of the day.
The future worth defending is made of those things. The point of having the strength to survive is that Jewish life should contain something beyond the endless work of survival.
That is why I refuse the demand that we prove our peacefulness by becoming easier to destroy. Jewish morality has room for the obligation to protect Jewish life. Jewish compassion includes our own children. Our prayers for peace do not become fraudulent when we refuse to entrust their fulfillment to people who have given us every reason to fear them. Those prayers acquire their deepest seriousness when we insist that peace must be something our children can actually live inside.
We will keep saying shalom. We will say it at the door, at the end of a conversation, across a Friday-night table crowded with people we love. We will keep placing that word in the mouths of our children because it expresses the life we want them to inherit.
But they deserve to grow up knowing that the Jewish greeting is a wish for their future, not a promise that their parents will leave them defenseless. We intend to be here to greet them when they come home — and make no apologies about it.
Israelis want a real and lasting peace. Not ever being allowed to win the war by international pressure or giving land for peace is over. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood must be defeated!
Critics never say what Israel should have done in the face of the October 7 massacre. That tells you their rhetoric is just hiding antisemitism and trying to make it respectable. It isn’t and they aren’t.