Palestinian and Jewish protesters stage rare peace march
Chanting “yes, to peace, yes, to a deal,” hundreds of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis marched noisily through Tel Aviv on Thursday night, demanding an end to the war in Gaza and the cycle of violence.
Their agenda starts with a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, but ultimately, they want to reboot Palestinian-Israeli relations, and breathe new life into the moribund peace movement.
“It basically went silent after October 7,” and the start of the war, Amira Mohammed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said of the peace camp.
“The radicals became louder than the peace movement. So right now, we’ve got to be radical about the peace that we want.”
Mohammed said that included an “acknowledgement of the power dynamic between occupier and occupied” as well as “accountability on both sides.”
“We can’t stop violence with more violence,” said teacher Carmit Bar Levy, 49.
“We need to ensure a good life for both Palestinians and Jews inside of Israel. We have to acknowledge they have the same right to live here as us.”
She said there was a growing sense since the outbreak of the war that the status quo could not hold.
“Peace is the only way forward,” said Marcelo Oliki, 64, a survivor of the Hamas-attacks on Kibbutz Nirim.
“There are children, women and babies dying just across the border from me. There are people there who are grieving too, just like me, and that want peace, too, like me.”
As the war grinds on, demonstrations have erupted in Israel’s largest city multiple times a week, some staged by families of the hostages in Gaza, some held by anti-government demonstrators active before the war, and others by the Jewish-Arab peace camp.
About 20 percent of Israel’s 9.5 million inhabitants are Arab, and many of whom identify as Palestinian.
According to activists and watchdogs, Palestinian citizens of Israel have struggled to get authorization for anti-war protests. Thursday’s march was postponed a week after organizers said permission was abruptly withdrawn.
While Tel Aviv’s various protest groups may diverge on politics, they overlap in the call for an immediate ceasefire.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his insistence on “total victory” while addressing the US Congress on Wednesday, while at home, members of his far-right coalition have threatened to collapse the government over any deal with Hamas.
The Hamas attack that started the war on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
“We have to remember that peace is an option, we don’t have to convince the far-right… we just need to convince the people in the middle who don’t want any more war,” said Maya Ofer, 23, a student and member of activist group Standing Together, which organized the march.
The group’s co-director Rula Daoud addressed a crowd waving signs reading “peace now” and “war has no winner.”
The demonstrators insisted their vision for long-term political solutions stemmed not from idealism but deep pragmatism.
“Two peoples live in this country, and neither of them is going anywhere,” Daoud said.