Al Jazeera June 7, 2025
No genuine peace camp; The settler-colonial mindset at the core of the Israeli state has precluded the emergence of a genuine drive for peace.

As a result, successive Israeli governments have continued to pursue war, colonisation and expansion, even when seemingly embracing peace talks.

In the 1990s Israel had the opportunity to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict by withdrawing from the territories occupied in 1967 and accepting the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Instead, it used the negotiations as a smokescreen to advance settler-colonial policies.

Even leaders like Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was hailed as a peacemaker and assassinated for it, by a Jewish extremist, did not really envision Israelis and Palestinians living side by side. Under his government and during the peace negotiations, the expansion of Jewish settlements continued at a steady pace, while plans for a segregation wall on occupied Palestinian land were pushed forward.

Meanwhile, Rabin and other Israeli leaders involved in the peace negotiations focused primarily on normalising Israel’s existence as it was, without addressing the root causes of the conflict. They sought to pacify Palestinian resistance, rather than establish durable peace.

The absence of a peace camp is not only at the leadership level but also at the societal one.

While the Israeli society has active movements for social causes, settlers’ coalitions, and now a movement pushing for continuing the prisoner exchanges with Hamas, it lacks a genuine grassroots peace movement that recognises Palestinian rights.

This is in sharp contrast to other settler-colonial societies, in which there was a push from within to end colonialism.