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HomeRead, Watch, ListenIsrael
PeacebuildingNewsIsrael

Peace summit refines vision for a better Israel

Arab participation in a future government may be electorally essential - and a potential turning point.
Ittay Flescher
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People’s Peace Summit

On stage at the People’s Peace Summit in Tel Aviv (Ittay Flescher)

Published: 4 May 2026

Last updated: 4 May 2026

"Without Arabs, you will not come to power." That was MK Ahmad Tibi speaking directly to Naftali Bennett on Thursday night, before thousands of Israelis packed into Expo Tel Aviv for the People's Peace Summit.

Tibi wasn't just making a moral argument. He was making an electoral one, and he was right.

According to current polling, neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Naftali Bennett can form a majority government without the support of Arab parties. In a Knesset where 61 seats are needed to govern, the maths is unforgiving: no Jewish-only bloc has the numbers. The question isn't whether Arab political partnership matters, it's whether Israeli Jewish society is willing to finally admit it.

Thursday night's summit was the first major convening of the peace camp since the fighting with Iran and Lebanon ended, and six months after the ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza.

Bereaved Israelis who lost loved ones on October 7 shared the stage with Palestinians who lost loved ones in Gaza. A standing ovation greeted protective presence volunteers, who put their bodies on the line to defend Palestinians from violent Israeli settler attacks that now happen on an almost daily basis.

The Jewish Independent

Or Sivan, Ruti Netzer Baidatz, Doron Meinrath, Aviv Tatarsky,  Amira Musallam (On screen), and Roi Kleitman sharing about their experiences doing protective presence in the West Bank

Religious and secular Jews also came together at the conference. Roi Kleitman a Smol Emuni activist who studied at a religious high school yeshiva in Otniel, said, “As someone who grew up rooted in Torah and mitzvot, it pains me deeply to see what some of the people I care about most on the left have come to represent on the ground. Palestinian child bursting into tears at the sight of a religious Jew is a severe desecration of God’s name, an immense moral failure.”

He added, “Our struggle is for the right to sanctify God’s name in the world, to restore to our identity the face of compassion and justice. For us, partnership and protective presence are not merely an edge form of activism, but a complete way of life, a daily social and religious commandment. Just as religious Zionism turned settling the land into a communal life mission, we turn human partnership into our life mission.”

The music carried its own political weight. The Jerusalem Youth Chorus opened the evening with Shir Lashalom, sung in both Hebrew and Arabic, the song Yitzhak Rabin sang moments before he was shot by a right-wing extremist in 1995. It was a deliberate, almost unbearable reminder of what incitement costs.

Then Dana International took the stage with a pulsing, dance-floor reimagining of "Oseh Shalom" that felt unmistakably like her 1998 Eurovision-winning "Diva": euphoric, defiant, utterly Israeli. And the evening closed with Achinoam Nini (Noa) singing "Bella Ciao," the Italian anti-fascist anthem, set to the Hebrew words of "Sachki Sachki," the poem once proposed by Ruth Calderon as an alternative national anthem for Israel.

MK Gilad Kariv delivered perhaps the sharpest speech of the evening. He named what has happened since the last gathering in Jerusalem: annexation has accelerated, nationalist violence in the West Bank has intensified, and a government that was supposed to be fighting Hamas has instead expanded its doctrine of conflict management into Iran and Lebanon. And then he made three concrete commitments should his Democratim party end up in the next coalition.

A parliamentary-civil task force to combat annexation. A platform for coalition negotiations that includes canceling annexation measures, dismantling outposts, and renewing dialogue with the Palestinian Authority.

"We commit to Jewish-Arab political partnership," he said. In Israel in 2026, that sentence still sounds radical to some. It shouldn't.

The international dimension of the evening was significant too. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, speaking via recorded message, announced that France will convene an international peace conference in Paris on June 12, bringing together Israeli and Palestinian civil society. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced 8 million euros in new support for peace organizations in Israel.

Many speakers referenced the upcoming elections as an opportunity. The French foreign minister framed it plainly: the elections in Israel and the Palestinian Authority are two chances to move toward peace. The speeches of MKs Naama Lazimi, Gilad Kariv, Alon Schuster, Ahamad Tibi and Ayman Odeh all pointed toward something that Israeli politics has struggled to build for a generation: a credible, cross-communal alternative.

I've been sceptical, at times, about whether gatherings like this translate into votes. Concerts and speeches don't change governments. But political momentum is real, and it has to start somewhere. After two and a half years of war, after the trauma of October 7 and the devastation it unleashed in Gaza, after rounds in Lebanon and Iran, Israeli society is exhausted. Netanyahu's government has no endgame. Bennett, if he returns, has shown no clear break from the security paradigm that got us here. The country needs something new, not a repackaged version of the old conflicts, but a genuine vision.

Tibi ended his remarks by quoting the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: "On this land there is that which deserves life." It was a line aimed, I think, not just at Bennett, but at all of us Jewish Israelis who have spent years building a politics of fear and a strategy of indefinite conflict management, as if the alternative were simply too complicated to attempt.

What Thursday night showed me is that there are Israelis, more than the mainstream media reflects, who are ready to try.  The arithmetic is simple: without Arabs, you cannot win. But the deeper truth is the one Tibi pointed to: without Arabs, Israel cannot build the future it claims to want.

We have been living by the sword for too long. Thursday night offered a glimpse, fragile, imperfect, hopeful, of what choosing differently might look like.

WATCH THE PEACE CONFERENCE

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About the author

Ittay Flescher

Ittay Flescher

Ittay Flescher is the Jerusalem Correspondent for The Jewish Independent. For over twenty years, he has worked as an educator, journalist, and peacebuilder in Melbourne and Jerusalem. His book, The Holy and the Broken: A Cry for Israeli-Palestinian Peace from a Land that Must Be Shared, was longlisted for the 2025 Walkley Book Awards.

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Comments1

  • Avatar of janet

    janet4 May at 07:55 am

    Real change must come. The binary is not Israel or Palestine, but life or death. The Its Time Coalition is leading the way toward a change that means life. In Sydney we just held a gathering in solidarity with their People’s Peace Summit. Please enjoy: the program starts 15 minutes into the video.
    https://www.youtube.com/live/wFNdVdRg7CM?si=d-Y674cEEtdvvhym