Israel’s optimists gather for People’s Peace Summit 

With Israeli troops erasing the remnants of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, settlers displacing numerous Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Israelis still traumatized October 7, 2023, the timing might seem inauspicious for a gathering in support of peace. 

Add to that the fact that the Palestinian Authority is in disarray, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is unchallenged and that rightists attacked two anti-war events this week in a spilling of extremist attacks onto the streets of Beersheva and Ra’anana. 

But the It’s Time coalition of 60 Israeli peace and civil society groups is undeterred. Its leaders insist that the dire circumstances make the May 8-9 gathering in Jerusalem calling for an end to the Gaza war all the more urgent. They hope the gathering, titled the People’s Peace Summit, can spark political momentum and revive peace hopes that never recovered from the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. 

“The goal is to bring the possibility of peace back into the Israeli discourse because it was violently removed from the conversation for thirty years,” says Mika Almog, a coalition leader. “This entails creating a bridge between the pro-democracy struggle and the struggle for peace and ending the war.” 

The conference is a follow up to a gathering last July in Tel Aviv that was the first major gathering of the peace camp since it was set back by Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack, which sparked Israel’s ongoing Gaza military campaign. 

According to Almog, the Israeli peace camp is actually bigger and more diverse than it is depicted in the media, and also stronger than it is perceived by its own adherents. “We feel alone and that anyone who speaks of peace is belittled, ridiculed or branded a traitor,” she said.