Israel never wanted peace? Here's the actual truth.
The historical record tells a far more nuanced story than many are willing to admit.
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This is a guest essay by Avi Mayer, founder of the Jerusalem Journal and former Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Post.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Recently, I stood in the Oxford Union Society1 and delivered the closing argument in a fiery debate about Israel.
Arguing against the proposition that “Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine,” I followed Emily Schrader, Hen Mazzig, Dr. Einat Wilf, and an impressive young Oxford student named Yonatan Ben-Menachem. Speaking in favor of the motion were Dr. Ghada Karmi, Sami Hamdi, Professor Ilan Pappé, David Hearst, and Arwa Elrayess, the Union president.
Predictably, our side lost the audience vote, but by a far slimmer margin than we had anticipated: 129 to 208.
We entered the chamber knowing that we would be facing a largely hostile audience, but determined to make our case nevertheless. By the end of the evening, we heard from several students that we had, in fact, changed their minds — a reminder that calm, substantive argument can still move people, even in the most challenging environments.
What follows is the text of my speech as prepared. In delivering it, I added a brief remark about our opponents’ repeated refusal to engage directly with the actual proposition before the House — a theme that ran throughout the debate.
Madam President,
Members of the House,
Ladies and gentlemen,
It falls to me to bring our case, and this debate, to a close.
My colleagues have ably set out the long history of Zionist and then Israeli efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians: the compromises proposed, the territorial concessions offered, and the repeated willingness of Israeli leaders and the Israeli public to take extraordinary risks in pursuit of that goal — risks all too often paid for in Israeli blood.
Our opponents, for their part, have offered a very different story. We have heard painful accounts of dispossession — and they are indeed painful, Dr. Karmi. We have heard selective readings of history and arguments that deny any genuine Jewish claim to the land that both peoples call home. We have heard contortions of logic and inversions of truth that seek to explain away every Israeli overture, every negotiation, every concession, as something other than it appeared to be.
And that brings us to the real question before this House tonight.
Because we are not being asked whether Israeli governments have fallen short in their efforts to bring about peace. Some have, while others (including those described earlier) have offered dramatic and far-reaching concessions to bring peace about.
We are not being asked whether Israeli and Palestinian leaders have, at times, missed opportunities that might have brought peace closer. They have. We are not even being asked whether Palestinians — and Israelis — have suffered due to the absence of peace. They have.
No, the motion before this House tonight is far more extreme. It posits that Israel never wanted peace with Palestine.
Never.
Never?
Not Rabin2? Not Peres3? Not Barak4? Not Olmert5? Not the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who filled public squares in support of peace? Not the millions who voted for leaders promising territorial compromise? Not the Israeli parents of every generation who, knowing all too well the cost of war, hoped and prayed and dreamed that their children would be the first to finally know peace?
Never?
Ladies and gentlemen, our opponents have spent this evening asking you to believe something striking: that when Israelis spoke of and prayed for peace, they didn’t mean it. That when Zionist and Israeli leaders offered concessions for peace, they didn’t mean it. That when millions of Israelis voted for peace, they didn’t mean it, either.
This is not an argument about Israeli policy. It is an argument about Israeli motives, about the Israeli soul. And the difficulty for our opponents is that they have chosen the wrong people. Because there is no value more essential to the Jewish national soul than peace. The Jewish tradition is suffused with the quest for peace. It courses through our religious texts, animates our prayers, and inspires our vision of a more perfect world.
It was the prophet Isaiah who envisioned a future in which peace reigned among nations, uttering those immortal words: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
Every single day, for two millennia, Jews have ended their daily prayers with supplications for peace. The Talmud goes so far as to say that shalom, peace, is one of God’s names, elevating it from an earthly aspiration to the realm of the divine. It is no surprise, then, that when the earliest Zionist thinkers contemplated the Jewish state they sought to create, they envisioned it at peace.
Socialists and liberals, revisionists and traditionalists, they differed profoundly in their visions of the state to be. Yet across those divisions ran a remarkably consistent belief: that the Jewish national home should one day live at peace with its neighbors. That aspiration found perhaps its clearest expression in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, issued as five Arab armies advanced upon the nascent state.
Even in that moment of existential peril, Israel’s founders proclaimed: “We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.”
And indeed, for generations of Israelis, that aspiration has been not merely a line in a founding document. It has been a sought-after reality, a national ideal, and a deeply personal hope.
I am a relic of the 1980s. The first word I learned on my first day of primary school in Jerusalem was shalom (peace) — an experience shared by all Israelis, including those in this room, on both sides of this debate. I remember watching, wide-eyed, as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, certain that a new era of peace was upon us.
I remember standing in a massive crowd with my father and younger sister as we were swept toward the gates of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) to pay our respects to Rabin, felled by an assassin’s bullets in his pursuit of peace. I remember the wave of Hamas suicide bombings that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israelis, including two young girls from my neighborhood — one year my junior — killed in a Jerusalem pizzeria.
And I remember how, even in the midst of that surge of murderous terror, even in the wake of a prime minister’s assassination, Israelis pivoted not to the Right but to the Left, electing a leader who had explicitly campaigned on a platform of territorial concessions for peace and granting Ehud Barak one of the largest margins of victory in Israeli history.
But Israel never wanted peace? Never? Really?
Ladies and gentlemen, that claim crumbles under the weight of documented history.
One can argue that peace has proven elusive. One can argue that opportunities have been missed. One can argue that terrible mistakes have been made. One can even argue that, today, after October 7th, the appetite for territorial concessions in the interest of peace is vastly diminished.
But to argue that Israelis never wanted peace is not a serious reading of history. It is a denial of history. Indeed, it requires us to believe that millions of people, across multiple generations, did not truly mean what they said — to one another, to their neighbors, and even to God — about one of their most heartfelt aspirations.
If every expression of peace was merely a ruse, every offer a deception, every aspiration a lie, then we are left with a familiar accusation — that what Jews said was never what Jews meant.
But beneath much of what we have heard here tonight lies an even deeper, and darker, argument. It is an argument that has animated not only some of the views expressed in this chamber, but too often the positions of Palestinian leaders throughout this conflict.
It is not really about peace negotiations. It is not really about diplomatic proposals. It is not really about Camp David or Oslo or Annapolis. It is about legitimacy.
Because if one denies that the Jewish People have any genuine claim to this land, if one believes that Israel should never have come into being and should cease to exist today, then no Zionist or Israeli offer, no matter how sincere or expansive, can ever be enough. Peace itself becomes impossible, because one side’s very existence is regarded as an affront, an injustice, a blight to be erased.
But that is not the motion before this House. You are being asked whether Israel has ever truly wanted peace with Palestine. And if millions of Israelis marched for peace, voted for peace, and were willing to take far-reaching and deeply painful risks for peace, then the answer to that question is self-evidently yes.
Ladies and gentlemen, the tragedy of this conflict is not that peace has never been sought. The tragedy is that peace has been sought, and yet proven so painfully difficult to attain. The tragedy is that two peoples with deep and abiding ties to the same land have so often found themselves unable to reconcile their competing aspirations.
That is a tragedy, and it is one that we should all hope and pray comes swiftly to an end, for the sake of all who live in that cherished land. But it is not evidence that peace was never desired. And it is certainly not evidence that an entire people spent generations engaged in an elaborate collective deception about one of their most deeply-held hopes — one that goes to the very depths of their national soul.
For all its mistakes, for all its failures, for all the opportunities lost along the way, Israel has wanted peace. Jewish tradition says so. History says so. The lived experience of generations of Israelis says so. And I hope this House will say so as well.
I urge you to reject the motion. Thank you very much.
This essay first appeared in the Jerusalem Journal.
The Oxford Union Society is a debating society in the city of Oxford, England, whose membership is drawn primarily from the University of Oxford. Founded in 1823, it is one of Britain’s oldest university unions and is widely considered as one of the world’s most prestigious private students’ societies.
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 and was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995 because of his pursuit of peace with the Palestinians.
Shimon Peres devoted much of his political career to advancing peace negotiations and shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Oslo Accords process.
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered far-reaching territorial concessions at the 2000 Camp David summit in an effort to reach a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presented one of the most extensive peace proposals in Israeli history in 2008, including a Palestinian state in nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza.
👏👏👏👏👏 the willful ignorance of these fools brings down the reputation of Oxford Uni. As Jesus said, "Love your neighbour." And all his neighbours were Jews.
The issue to be debated is a great litmus test of sorts because it helps crystallize the disingenuousness of those who want israel to disappear and will obfuscate or lie in that quest. The speakers in favor of the resolution like so many who manned the college quads of America or marched in the streets of London( and elsewhere) and today win primaries in NEW YORK CITY itself have a desire for one thing only : no more israel and that of course means lots of dead jews .
Oxford is no.longer a revered English institution. It has bastardized itself as can be witnessed time after time in the Oxford Union. Of course England itself increasingly is a mere historic relic.