Meron Rapoport
+972 Magazine / May 8, 2026
At the ‘People’s Peace Summit’ in Tel Aviv, Israel’s embattled left showed signs of abandoning old formulas and embracing a politics of resistance.
“A peace conference that draws thousands of people is news. Why does every small gathering of the far right get news coverage warranting front-page headlines, while a massive event of the peace camp reconstituting itself does not? It’s delusional. The Israeli media … presents a reality in which there is no peace camp in Israel, and no alternative.”
These were the fighting words of Tami Yakira following the conclusion of “The People’s Peace Summit” in Tel Aviv last Thursday, organized by the “It’s Time” coalition of over 80 Israeli civil society organizations, of which Yakira is a coordinator.
And she is right: While the 5,000-strong peace conference went largely unnoticed by the Israeli media, there was wall-to-wall coverage of the Likudiada, the annual summit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, which took place simultaneously in the southern city of Eilat — and with roughly half the number of attendees. In fact, so poorly attended was the Likudiada that its main event, a speech by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, was cancelled at the last minute because no one showed up to the hall.
In the newsrooms of the major newspapers and TV networks, they will explain that Israeli-Palestinian peace is “not relevant”; that “no one is talking about a Palestinian state” (as Naftali Bennett, who aspires to replace Netanyahu as prime minister in the forthcoming election, has claimed); or that such events produce low ratings because they irritate the audience.
But all of these explanations are mere excuses to justify the decision — conscious or unconscious — to erase from public discourse any trace of the possibility that a political agreement with the Palestinians is necessary and achievable, and that we are not forever destined to live by the sword.
Paradoxically, it seems that the media’s disregard had a radicalizing effect on the content of the peace summit: The vast majority of speakers, at least those who took the stage at the main ceremony, made no attempt to moderate their language in order to appeal to the mainstream media — for which discussing peace is naïve and mentioning the occupation is off-limits.
Of the 44 speakers at the main ceremony — some of whom appeared on stage, some in pre-recorded videos — almost half were Palestinians, whether citizens of Israel or from the West Bank and Gaza. They described reality as they see it: genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, occupation, settler and army terror. And the Jewish-Israeli speakers were not far behind in pointing to Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians as the root of the perpetual violence in our region.
As Yonatan Zeigen, the son of peace activist Vivian Silver who was murdered by Hamas on October 7, put it: his mother’s death “could have been prevented,” and the violence did not begin on October 7. “It’s not that we don’t want peace because it’s complicated,” he told the summit. “Peace is complicated because we don’t want it.”
In the same vein, Dor Inon, grandson of Bilha and Yakov Inon who were also murdered on October 7, condemned the “cynical use” Israel made of their deaths, and the military’s insistence that “the path to a better future for Israelis” is paved through “the bereavement of Palestinians, Lebanese, or Iranians.” To widespread applause, he concluded: “The truth is simple: You cannot buy paradise with blood.”
Resistance enters the discourse
Another manifestation of the discourse that dominated the event was the central place given to “protective presence” activists — those who put their bodies between Palestinians in rural West Bank villages and the Israeli settlers and soldiers who seek to displace them. It was these activists who received the loudest applause from the audience, and toward whose work much of the evening was oriented.
This represents a shift in how the Israeli “peace camp” perceives itself. It is now a camp of resistance. This resistance is directed not only against “settler terror,” but also the army leadership and the soldiers who stand aside — and, in many cases, actively assist — as settler militias attack Palestinian communities.
For Israel’s peace camp, the army has long been beyond criticism. The occupation was presented as a kind of traffic accident, and the settlers as a kind of foreign body that had taken over the state and steered it off its proper course. Here, however, while there was still no explicit or widespread call for military refusal, the army was presented as an immoral actor.
For decades, moreover, the central theme of what is traditionally called the “Zionist left” was that the occupation must end in order to protect Israel’s Jewish demographic majority and preserve its character as a “Jewish and democratic state.” But those concepts were notably absent from the speeches delivered on stage by this camp’s leading representatives in the Knesset: Gilad Kariv and Na’ama Lazimi of the Democrats.
For Kariv, October 7 was “a direct result of the false conflict-management doctrine,” and he regrets that the anti-Netanyahu camp in the Knesset is “playing within the rules of the game drawn by the far right.” He also called for the establishment of a Knesset lobby to fight “settler terror” and support protective presence, and reaffirmed his support for a governing coalition that includes Israel’s Arab parties. (While he did not name names, Kariv’s speech was followed by addresses from both Ahmad Tibi and Ayman Odeh, suggesting he was not only referring to the more conciliatory Mansour Abbas, who was not present.)
Lazimi, meanwhile, said that Israel had adopted expulsion as policy and that “security will be achieved when both peoples who call this land home have personal security, live with dignity, and have hope for the future.” When she, like Kariv, expressed her commitment to the principle of Jewish-Arab partnership in politics, the hall thundered with applause.
This does not mean that these parliamentarians are about to renounce Zionism, or that their party has abandoned its aspiration toward a “Jewish and democratic state.” On the contrary, the Democrats’ platform for the upcoming election states that separation from the Palestinians is essential in part to preserve “a solid Jewish majority” in Israel. It may not have been a coincidence that party leader Yair Golan was absent from the summit; had he been there, he might have said something rather different.
But the very fact that Kariv and Lazimi chose to focus on messages of resistance, Jewish-Arab partnership, and equality is interesting even at the electoral level. After all, some of the thousands in the audience last Thursday may well take part in the Democrats’ primaries, and Kariv and Lazimi know precisely what they want to hear.
Hope out of alienation
Of course, one cannot declare fundamental change in the Israeli left on the basis of a single conference. But it seems evident that six years of disruptive protests — against Netanyahu’s corruption, his government’s judicial overhaul, and the war in Gaza — have taught this camp, which once saw itself as part of the establishment or even its embodiment, what resistance to power looks like. Among this audience, getting arrested at protests has become a badge of honor.
For Israel’s shrunken peace camp, the formation of the current right-wing government, and the central role played in it by far-right figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, has led to an unprecedented sense of alienation from the government and its arms of oppression. The war of extermination that followed Hamas’ massacre on October 7 only deepened this alienation further.
Despite all the efforts that the government and media have invested in denial over the past two and a half years, the fact that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is becoming common sense among this camp — and perhaps beyond it. Even veteran mainstream military correspondents are now calling what is happening in the West Bank by its name: ethnic cleansing.
This sense of alienation enables or pushes this camp to adopt language that is sharper, less apologetic, and less consensus-seeking. If the media is silencing us, this approach says, we will say whatever we like and with even more vigor. And when the right is led by Kahanists, and when Avraham Zarbiv — the face of Israel’s campaign to raze Gaza to the ground — is invited to light a torch at the official state Independence Day ceremony, the very possibility of seeking consensus is perceived as a betrayal of the camp’s most fundamental values.
To this alienation one can add an almost opposite phenomenon: a sense of self-confidence. The fact that polls currently predict that Netanyahu’s government will not achieve a majority in the election, due to be held in just over five months, is putting wind in the sails of Israel’s peace camp. It sees the end of right-wing rule as a realistic possibility, and therefore feels it can propose a different horizon.
A Palestinian journalist who attended the summit told me that she felt it was disconnected from the racist and genocidal reality prevailing in Israel, and that she did not understand where the audience’s sense of hope and enthusiasm came from. There is much truth in her words.
The thousands who participated in the summit represent only part of the broader Zionist left, and the party that represents it — the Democrats — is struggling to reach 10 out of the Knesset’s 120 seats in the polls. Moreover, even if Netanyahu falls, the Democrats will likely sit in a government led by Naftali Bennett, who once headed Israel’s largest settler organization. In such a scenario, the occupation and settlements will continue in full force, and the prospects of seeing meaningful Jewish-Arab partnership in the coalition would be slim.
And yet, something is definitely shifting. An Israeli left is emerging — not large, but not entirely marginal either — that positions itself in staunch resistance to Israel’s government, settlers, and army. It does not harbor the illusion that simply removing Netanyahu would return Israel to “better days,” as if one only needs to give the occupation a little shake to return to “Zionism’s true essence” which is to preserve Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.”
This camp, it seems, understands that the change required is far deeper and more fundamental. And it is determined to keep acting — whether the media gives it a platform or not.
Meron Rapoport is an editor at Local Call
