The Urgency of Peace in Israel and Palestine

Who needs peace the most?

I want to highlight this X post from Samer Sinijlawi, who is a growing voice for peace and coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. Similar to myself, he also had an article on his visions for peace published by The Atlantic.

Samer was born in Jerusalem and lived in Palestine his whole life, and was in fact jailed by the Israeli government for his role in throwing stones during the First Intifada. I was born in the UK, and have never lived in Palestine permanently. Regardless, we seem to have reached a similar conclusion.

It is Palestinians who are dying in Gaza in larger numbers. Hamas wanted a real war between Gaza and Israel, and they got it. But war between Palestine and Israel is a dead end. It’s not going to be a victory for Hamas. Hamas invaded Israel on October 7th 2023, and captured hostages but since then it has really been one way traffic. So who needs peace more? Well, Israelis for the most part are living an essentially normal life. And Gaza? It’s as far from normal as anything I can imagine in the modern world:

The Gazan economy is in free-fall, unemployment is ubiquitous. Who is hurting the most from the status quo? It is obviously Gaza, not Israel.

I find it really baffling that many Palestinians and pro-Palestinians take the attitude that peace is really only a question for Israelis to address. To some extent, this is an overhang from Marxist and Fanonist narratives such as those found in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that portray conflicts essentially as a matter of the oppressed against the oppressor, and the one with the most power is inevitably the oppressor, and to resolve the conflict the one with the most power must stop the conflict, and until then it is inevitable that the oppressed will resist until the oppressor ends their oppression.

But this kind of reading isn’t actually very sympathetic to those who are disempowered. In some respects it seems to portray the disempowered group as unthinking automata. In that respect it is like a form of dehumanisation.

Amartya Sen addressed this dynamic in Development as Freedom. Disempowered groups are not merely subjects of oppressive structures but can and should act as agents of change as much as they possibly can. Conflicts are not merely power struggles but are much more multidimensional. At the very least, there is a shared responsibility for building peace. Yes, maybe it’s much easier for Israelis to advocate for peace than Gazans, that is true. But that doesn’t stop Palestinians from having a much greater urgency about this, because for many of them, it could be the difference not only between poverty and prosperity, but between life and death.

That’s why I want peace, and I advocate for peace while emphasising my own agency, and that of other Palestinians in achieving peace.

We have to make peace. There is no alternative. And until we achieve peace we have to push for peace on every front.

You can reiterate Marx, and Fanon, and that entire miserable pantheon of nonsense, but it has done nothing to help Palestinians.