From +972 Magazine.
In a context of fear, hatred, and violence, an Israeli-Palestinian gathering that seemed detached from reality actually represented something revolutionary.
At first glance, the Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Tel Aviv on July 1 appeared detached, almost delusional. And in some ways, it was.
With around 6,000 attendees, the event was the country’s largest anti-war gathering since October 7, outside of street protests. As they filed into the Menora Arena, giant screens displayed a video from 2019 about a group of musicians from the southern city of Sderot who teamed up with a group in Gaza to create a joint music and dance video. As if to further emphasize the stark distance between that time and our current one, it was immediately followed by a segment from John Lennon’s song “Imagine.”
This idyllic atmosphere inside the stadium was shattered by the first group of speakers to take the stage: Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose family members were killed or kidnapped in the Hamas-led attack nine months ago, or killed in Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza. One speaker, Liat Atzili, was herself kidnapped and held captive until late November.
Listening to each speaker’s personal horror stories felt like being punched in the stomach over and over again. There was hardly a dry eye in the audience — especially when they collectively read the poem “Revenge” by the late Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, as a collective stand against retribution. In between such stories, in what felt like an unbridgeable emotional leap, peace anthems were sung throughout the event, including the uplifting “Today,” “The Prayer of the Mothers” and “Song for Peace” — forever associated with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin — which were met with festive applause and enthusiastic dancing.
It was difficult to reconcile the dissonance between these moments of jubilation with the reality outside. Israel’s onslaught has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, obliterated the entire Gaza Strip, forced hundreds of thousands to live in tents without food, and thrown thousands of others into prison camps under conditions of torture and abuse. Meanwhile, since the October 7 attack that killed around 1,200 Israelis, tens of thousands more remain displaced from their homes in the north and south of the country, and the fate of the remaining hostages suffering in captivity continues to preoccupy everyone’s minds.
Adding to all this, while the crowd in the stadium was dancing, the Israeli army ordered thousands in the city of Khan Younis to flee ahead of yet another ground incursion. None of the speakers addressed these developing events, and much less was said about the horrors of the war than one would expect.
The dissonance was further exacerbated by the absence of any real solutions to the enormous problems facing Israeli and Palestinian societies today. Many of the speakers demanded an immediate ceasefire and a hostage-prisoner exchange, some vaguely mentioned a “political settlement,” and a few spoke of “two states.” But for three hours, not one of the dozens of speakers outlined a concrete plan for the “peace camp” that this event was meant to revive. (Peace activists Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, among the initiators of the conference, promised that they are working on a detailed outline which will be published soon.)
Pragmatically-speaking, any large Israeli mobilization for peace must inevitably account for security needs, and this is a debate that we must continue to developon the left. But nobody at the conference suggested how to deal with the challenges of Hamas and Hezbollah beyond the short term, nor the growing illegitimacy of the Palestinian Authority among Palestinians — very real and pressing issues for many Israelis.
Haggai Matar is an award-winning Israeli journalist and political activist, and is the executive director of +972 Magazine.