Peace. It is time to bring back this word. Even more, it is time to expect and demand it. In the midst of what we thought was peace, we were wrong not to prepare and think of war. In the midst of a brutal war, it is time to envision peace. It used to be understood that this is how wars end. One side wins and another side loses, even surrenders.
From that clear basis that ends the war, peace is negotiated. This simple idea seems to have been forgotten. As so many in the world engage in hysterical cries for ceasefires, we should stand up to enunciate a clear vision of peace.
A year ago, on October 7th, when Israel declared war in response to the Palestinian invasion, occupation, brutal massacre, and kidnapping, we made the cardinal of declaring war only against Hamas, when we should have declared war on the ideology of Palestinianism – of which Hamas is but the most recent and brutal executor. On October 7th we should have said, and we should still say, “This ends here: from Gaza to Columbia, this ideology, that for more than a century has vowed to prevent, and then undo, the existence of a sovereign state for the Jewish people in any part and of any size in the ancestral homeland, must die.”
This kind of declaration would have also naturally led to a vision of peace. We need to declare that this war ends when that ideology of Palestinianism is replaced with a constructive one. It needs to be replaced by an ideology that seeks to live next to a Jewish state, rather than instead of it as understood from the chant refrain From The River to the Sea.
The war will end when Palestinianism dies
This is a vision we must reiterate daily. We need a leader who every day speaks to the world to say that “the day that Palestinians end their century-long war with Zionism, the day they develop a constructive vision rather than a destructive one, the day they want to live next to a Jewish state, rather than instead of it, the day they understand they are not multiple-generational refugees, and accept that there is no such thing as a 'right of return' into the sovereign territory of the state of Israel, is the day that they will find, as it always was, that we are willing to live in peace with them side by side in two separate states.”
This is the vision we need to uphold with Lebanon. No more feeble calls to implement previous UN resolutions that no one bothered to enforce until Israel started enforcing Hezbollah’s disarmament by force. We need to demand that this war ends with full and complete peace between Lebanon and Israel, nothing less. We have no territorial dispute with Lebanon and until they choose peace, it shall be war – we will decide when and how to fight it – but no more one-sided ceasefires, empty UN resolutions, and worse than useless UN “peacekeeping forces.”
Finally, we must go back to those neighboring countries with whom we officially have peace, and demand that they finally begin to look like peace, rather than glorified nonbelligerency agreements. While we have given Egypt the entirety of the Sinai Peninsula, we received much less than peace in return.
Egypt continues to be the number one creator and disseminator of the worst kind of antisemitic content in Arabic. There are no cultural relations, no tourism, and barely any diplomatic relations. Egypt, with Jordan, spearheads many anti-Israel resolutions in international bodies, has clearly enabled the military build-up in Gaza and to top it all, its American-equipped military, conducts its military exercises with Israel as its target threat. Jordan is no better on all these counts, with the added aggravation that its Queen goes to every global platform to issue the most libelous claims against Israel. We call that peace, while all know it is anything but.
This is the part that demands we change. In our desperation to be accepted and to finally experience peace, we have allowed the realities that go by the names of peace, ceasefires, and disarmament to be degraded and altogether denied. To use the cliché of “Peace begins with us,” it is up to us to restore standards and dignity to our conduct so that when we say that we expect peace, it shall be known that we mean it.
The writer is a former Member of Knesset and author of the book We Should All Be Zionists.