Earlier this month, the 2025 edition of the peace conference "It's Time" (alternatively: "The Time Has Come") passed with barely a mention in the Israeli press or public discourse. That silence may owe something to the inaugural event's embrace of falsehoods a year earlier.
The most prominent speaker at the 2024 conference was historian, Hebrew University professor, and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari. On stage at Tel Aviv's Menora Mivtachim Arena, Harari told attendees:
"The bitter truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that each side fears the other is trying to annihilate it, and both sides are right… the Palestinians' fear that we want to annihilate them… is completely justified. It's not paranoia, [but rather] a sound reading of reality."
Professor Harari's credentials notwithstanding, he was wrong. Despite being fully capable of, as he put it, "annihilating" the Palestinians, we Israeli Zionists haven't done so because, contrary to Harari's words, the vast majority of us don't aspire to do that.
We are focused, above all, on retaining our sovereignty without getting raped and murdered. Our top priority is to ensure we are secure and capable of adequate self-defense. We built our national movement precisely to create a slice of sovereignty as a safe haven – and to this day, our public discourse bemoans a lack of safety more than it bemoans anything else.
When our attackers wage battle from behind and beneath their own civilians, thus forcing us to choose between defending ourselves or standing down, the tragic outcome is on them. That is not "trying to annihilate" non-combatants, and to suggest otherwise is to commit a gross misrepresentation.
"All these wars have led us into an abyss," Harari said at the same event. "The time has come to make peace."
Wars did not lead us to an abyss. They're actually our best attempt to defend ourselves while already in an abyss: a world that cannot contain us, and a region whose people only value liberation insofar as it gives them domination.
Our proven capacity to wage war is the only reason that October 7th, 2023 was a horrible shock and not a daily occurrence. The fact that fighting for our lives has not produced a perfect reality does not mean that refraining from fighting is better. Empirically, it's not better.
The Oslo peace process, not wars, emboldened Palestinians to blow themselves up on buses full of Israeli civilians. Disengagement from the Gaza Strip, not wars, led to Hamas sovereignty. Those who stand by Oslo and the disengagement should at least acknowledge the consequences. Don't blame war for what peacemaking has wrought.
It's misleading to repeat the old adage that peace is made with one's enemies; that's only true when the enemies' ideas have changed. Yet proponents of the struggle whose banner is 'Palestine' remain openly committed to eliminating the State of Israel "by any means necessary." The Israeli Left longs for peace as the gateway to normalcy, but there is no making peace with a society that turns territorial concessions into Gaza, post-2005.
Fortunately, most Israelis now understand that relinquishing border control to a society that overwhelmingly condones the deliberate killing of our children is precisely what advances efforts to kill our children. It's insane to do that. Perhaps the few who still think otherwise will gather again at next year's conference. Chances are, once again, nobody else will notice.
Josh Warhit runs Warhit Media Services. He made aliyah from the United States in 2012 and served in the Nahal Brigade (infantry) in the Israel Defense Forces.
