This assumption about Israelis makes no sense.
Most Israelis don't want war. They simply refuse to surrender to people who openly promise more of it.
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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.
There seems to be an assumption across much of the world that Israelis are somehow “pro-war.”
Sometimes it’s stated openly. More often it’s implied.
For instance, a 29-year-old American Jew told me this weekend, “They want us to be pro-Israel, and I’m not pro-Palestine, but I’m anti-war.”
At first glance, that sounds reasonable. Who wouldn’t be anti-war?
The problem is that many people confuse supporting a country’s right to defend itself with supporting war itself.
Israelis understand war better than most people on earth. That is precisely why they do not want it. To Israelis, war is deeply personal, with virtually every Israeli knowing someone who has been killed, wounded, or otherwise traumatized by war — and, often, multiple people.
It is true that Israel has lived in a near-constant state of conflict since the modern state’s founding in 1948. There have been ceasefires, pauses, periods of relative calm, and diplomatic breakthroughs. But the reality is that Israelis have spent generations living under the threat of invasion, terrorism, rockets, suicide bombings, kidnappings, and now ballistic missiles.
It is also true that the Israel Defense Forces is one of the strongest and most capable militaries in the world, pound for pound. The IDF and other Israeli defense institutions make news often for their daring operations and success rate. I am not sure if you noticed, but during the recent U.S.-Israel war against the Iranian regime, the U.S. Army experienced quite a few issues, while Israel did not lose a single plane or suffer a single soldier casualty.
Yet neither of those facts — Israel’s near-constant state of conflict and the strength of its defense establishment — means Israelis are pro-war. Most Israelis are pro-peace.
They’re also not suicidal.
The Talmud teaches: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” That is not a call for aggression. It is a recognition of reality. If someone announces their intention to murder you and then actively attempts to do so, self-defense is not warmongering. It is survival.
Most people understand this instinctively when it applies to individuals and countries like Ukraine. Somehow, when it comes to Jews defending themselves collectively, many suddenly become confused. When did self-defense become so controversial? Or is it only controversial when it comes to Israelis?
The truth is that Israelis have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to trade land, territory, strategic depth, and military advantages in pursuit of peace. Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace treaty, giving up territory more than twice the size of Israel itself. During the 1990s, Israel signed the Oslo Accords and recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization, historically a terrorist organization.
Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. Israel offered far-reaching concessions during negotiations at Camp David in 2000 and subsequent talks. Israel unilaterally withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005.
Israel signed peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Again and again, Israeli governments of the Left, Center, and Right have pursued diplomatic solutions, coexistence, normalization, and compromise.
Countries that are genuinely pro-war do not repeatedly surrender territory in exchange for promises of peace. Countries that are genuinely pro-war do not withdraw from territory. Countries that are genuinely pro-war do not spend decades proposing two-state solutions, including as far back as the 1937 Peel Commission. The overwhelming majority of Israelis would gladly choose peace tomorrow if they believed it would actually produce peace.
The question that Israel’s critics rarely ask, and even more rarely answer with some semblance of reality, is simple: Peace with whom?
If your neighbors openly celebrate the murder of your civilians, teach hatred of Jews to children, glorify terrorism, and promise to destroy your country, what exactly are you supposed to do? Lay down your weapons? Invite them for a picnic? Pretend they don’t mean what they say?
Of course, there are extremists in Israeli society who genuinely embrace conflict and maximalist visions. Every society has extremists.
But based on my own experiences over more than 50 visits to Israel, and conversations with dozens of Israeli friends and acquaintances from across the political, religious, geographic, and socioeconomic spectrum, those voices appear to represent a loud minority (far less than 10 percent) rather than the mainstream.
In a conversation with Future of Jewish, Israeli-American settler Rachel Moore shedded some light on this, saying:
“I do live here [in Judea and Samaria / the West Bank] for ideological reasons, but I have a lot of neighbors who don’t. It isn’t necessarily indicative of everybody who’s here. There are people here because their family lives here, because of the school system, the proximity to Jerusalem, which were also reasons that we came. … But it isn’t necessarily that being a settler means that people may need an ideological choice.”
“Jews live in less than 12-percent geographically of the West Bank. We are not knocking on people’s doors and taking them out of their homes. We are not bulldozing people and saying, ‘You get out, we’re taking over now.’ Neve Daniel, my settlement, was built in a place not only that was deeded to Jews before the State of Israel, but didn’t have anybody living here.”
“That is not occupying someone’s land, that’s not taking anybody over, that’s taking empty land and choosing to make a presence that is Jewish. I don’t ideologically believe that there should be the ethnic cleansing of any area, anywhere in the world, where you can just say, ‘Jews can’t live here.’ The notion that because the West Bank is not property of Israel means it’s okay to say that no Jews should live there is morally problematic…”
And then Rachel added this: “I will always hold out hope that the Palestinians will hunger for peace and prosperity for their family more than martyrdom for national aspirations that involve the obliteration and annihilation of me and my people.”
In other words, the average Israeli (including many settlers) wants what most halfway-decent people want: safety, stability, prosperity, family, and a future for their children. The average Israeli does not wake up hoping for another war. The average Israeli wakes up hoping there won’t be one.
Unfortunately, many of Israel’s enemies have built entire political movements around perpetual conflict. Organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Iranian regime do not merely tolerate war. They openly glorify it. Their leaders routinely frame the destruction of Israel as a sacred mission. They promote it in their education systems, media, and politics.
Even the “more moderate” Palestinian Authority has an official pay-to-slay-Jews policy that results in stipends for offenders and their families who try to kill Jews in the West Bank or in Israel proper.
This is not completely surprising, since the Middle East and North Africa have been engulfed by Islam, and Islam is (both historically and still to this day) a violent religion that targets what Muslims refer to as “infidels.” Islam has always played a major part in the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Iranian-regime conflicts, and those of us in the international community who want to best understand these conflicts would be wise to start with the fact that these are not wars over land or resources, but holy wars over Islam’s tenets.
And so we have societies whose mainstream is pro-war (the Palestinians, the Hezbollah-influenced Lebanese, the Houthis-influenced Yemenites, the Islamists in Iran) versus another society whose fringe extremist minority is pro-war (the Israelis). It is unfortunate that I have to spell this out so directly, but confusing the exception for the rule is not analysis. It is propaganda.
Israelis and their well-informed supporters know that there is a profound difference between fighting because you want war and fighting because war has been brought to your doorstep. One is aggression, the other is self-preservation.
So when someone says they are “anti-war,” they may have misunderstood the situation entirely. Being anti-war does not mean opposing the right of a democracy to defend its citizens, including preemptively. Being anti-war does not mean believing that countries under attack are obligated to respond “proportionately” simply to keep the score even.
Being anti-war does not mean that because you opposed America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you must also oppose another country’s right to defend itself. Being anti-war does not mean asking Israelis to absorb terrorism, massacres, rockets, invasions, kidnappings, and missile attacks without responding.
Being anti-war means wanting the conditions that make true peace possible — and that requires confronting those who continually choose war over coexistence.
A healthy majority of Israelis are not pro-war. They are pro-peace, and they are also pro-survival. In a world where too many actors still dream of a Middle East without a Jewish state in the Jews’ indigenous homeland, being pro-peace and pro-survival are not contradictory positions.
To be “anti-war” when it comes to Israel is not a hot take. It’s the position most Israelis have held all along. The real question is whether those who claim to be anti-war are willing to oppose the people who keep starting them.
As Israel responded to Sunday night’s missile attacks from the Iranian regime, with the IDF striking in western and central Iran, Jerusalem’s ambassador in Washington, D.C. summed it up perfectly:
“Iran fired 11 ballistic missiles at Israel today. Each one of those missiles can level an entire neighborhood and kill hundreds. No self-respecting country in the world would tolerate such an attack, and neither will Israel.”
Vanessa, I think the idea that Israelis are pro-war is completely detached from reality.
If Israel truly wanted war, Gaza could have been flattened long ago. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated restraint and repeatedly taken risks for peace. The problem is that many of those risks produced more violence, not less.
What has changed over the years is not that Israelis became pro-war. What changed is that many Israelis stopped believing the illusion that giving up territory automatically produces peace. The withdrawal from Gaza is probably the clearest example. Instead of peace, Israelis got Hamas on their border, rockets, tunnels, kidnappings, and October 7.
Israelis haven't become more warlike. They've become more skeptical.
The old peace camp believed that if enough concessions were made, peace would follow. Many Israelis now believe that peace is impossible until the ideology dedicated to Israel's destruction is defeated or abandoned.
Israelis still want peace. They just want evidence that the other side wants peace too. After everything that has happened, that's not extremism. That's common sense.
By its very nature, of being surrounded by Iran and its proxy armies, the IDF HAS TO BE ‘one of the strongest and most capable militaries in the world’, otherwise Israel would face destruction.