TEL AVIV: Chanting “yes, to peace, yes, to a deal” a rare rally of hundreds of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis marched noisily through Tel Aviv on Thursday demanding an end to the Gaza war.
Their agenda starts with calling for a ceasefire in the more than nine-month Israel-Hamas war amid its spiralling death toll, but they ultimately seek more permanent solutions to end the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“It basically went silent after October 7,“ Amira Mohammed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel from east Jerusalem 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.”
To Mohammed, that includes an “acknowledgement of the power dynamic between occupier and occupied” and a “ton of accountability on both sides.”
“We’ve had enough, enough with violence, enough with the bloodshed,“ said 49-year-old teacher Carmit Bar Levy.
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. Out of 251 people taken hostage, 111 are still held in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not provide details on civilian and militant deaths.
“We can’t stop violence with more violence. We need to ensure a good life for both Palestinians and Jews inside of Israel. We have to acknowledge that they have the same right to live here as us, that this is home for us both,“ she added.
She acknowledges hers is not a mainstream view in Israel at the moment, but claims there is a growing sense the status quo cannot hold.
As the war grinds on, demonstrations and marches are staged in Israel’s largest city many times a week, some by families of the hostages, some held by anti-government demonstrators active before the Gaza war and the peace camp.
While political divisions separate the groups mostly into their own cliques, they overlap in their shared call for an immediate ceasefire.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his insistence on “total victory” against Hamas in a fiery address to the US Congress on Wednesday, while at home members of his far right coalition have threatened to collapse the government over any deal.
“Their government and our government only want war, that’s the only thing they’re good at doing,“ said Maya Ofer, 23, a student and member of activist group Standing Together.
“We have to remember that peace is an option, we don’t have to convince the far-right, that’s not our job. We just need to convince the people in the middle who don’t want any more war but who are not sure what other there is right now,“ she added.
The demonstrators insist their vision for long-term political solutions stem not pragmatism rather than pie-in-the-sky idealism.
“Peace is the only way forward,“ said Marcello 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”.
