Marco Zaffalon

Oxford debate is done! Kudos to the amazing team of @emilykschrader @HenMazzig @AviMayer More impressions later, but for now - here is the text of my talk in opposition to the proposition "This House Believes Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine": Israel wanted peace. Truly. Repeatedly. And yet, from the minute the United Nations voted for the Partition Plan in 1947, we have been under attack. The Arabs threatened to use force to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state on any part of our homeland, and they proceeded to make good on that threat. And what did that Partition Plan call for anyway? Was it some grave injustice to the Arabs? No. Most of the fertile land was to go to what would have become the Palestinian Arab state, while the Jewish state would be relegated to three pieces of barely contiguous, mostly arid non-arable territory. And yet, the Jews said yes. But the Arabs said no. First the Palestinian Arab militias attacked and then in May 1948, every Arab nation surrounding us and beyond invaded. And this is the only reason why there were ever any refugees from that war. The only reason. Israel managed to survive the 1948 Arab war, and we would have been happy to just live in peace. Remember, at the end of the 1948 war, Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt administered Gaza. There was nothing – absolutely nothing - to prevent them from creating one more Arab state on these territories for the Palestinians. They did not. Instead, they chose to continue the war against Israel, which is how Israel came to control the West Bank and Gaza. It was not in some aggressive land grab. It was after multiple Arab armies surrounded us - again - and in May 1967, announced: “This is our chance Arabs, to deal Israel a mortal blow of annihilation . . .” Israel won that war in six days, but even then, we offered peace, making it, as Abba Eban (of Cambridge, much better I believe, I went there too…) wryly observed “the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender." And, what was the Arab and Palestinian response to Israel offering peace? "No to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, no to negotiations". But we still hoped for peace. So, we entered the Oslo Peace process in 1993. And in September 2000, just when many Israelis, including me, truly believed that a two-state solution was close, Palestinians launched the Second Intifada escalating into a brutal campaign of suicide bombings that left over 1000 Israelis shred to bloody pieces with thousands more maimed for life. Yet, through all that, when in December 2000, President Bill Clinton put a peace deal on the table that would have given the Palestinians all of Gaza, 96% of the West Bank with comparable land swaps from within Israel, no settlements, safe passage between the two territories, most of the Old City, Arab East Jerusalem for a capital and an international force replacing the IDF on the West Bank - it was Israel that said yes. There was no excuse for the Palestinians not to take this deal. None. But the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat, walked away, choosing instead to continue blowing us up through suicide bombings. Ultimately this led to the construction of the security barrier, checkpoints, roadblocks in the West Bank which thankfully brought, for a while, an end to this reign of bloody terror. You would think we would get the message, but in 2008 it was Israel, through Prime Minister Olmert, who made yet another peace offer, A near-total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, with close to 100% land swaps; No settlements, A link to the Gaza Strip; Arab East Jerusalem as capital of Palestine. Israel would have given up sovereignty over all of the Old City – including the single holiest site to the Jewish people, The Temple Mount, which would be overseen by an international trusteeship. Again, there was no excuse for the Palestinians not to accept it. None. But under President Abbas, the Palestinians walked away from that, too. Israel even disengaged from Gaza in 2005, removing all settlements, allowing ourselves to believe that the elected government of Hamas wanted to focus on improving their people’s lives, instead of destroying ours. We were so desperate to believe this that we ignored all the red flags, allowing numerous Gazans to enter Israel to work, study and get specialized medical care. But all this emphasis on economic development and work permits was part of a carefully built deception, as Hamas leaders later boasted, to lull Israelis into thinking they really were going to mind their own business and live calmly next to us – while they were planning something very very different. On Oct 7, 2023 3000 trained and armed Palestinians invaded Israel from Gaza. Much of the intelligence they relied on came from the very Palestinians we allowed into Israel on work and study and medical permits. They massacred. They pillaged. They engaged in acts of gleeful sadistic brutality which I still lack the heart or the stomach to describe. They took 251 hostages – elderly men and women, mothers, fathers, children, babies. And it was not just trained militants, thousands of so-called “Ordinary ‘innocent’ civilian Palestinians” joined enthusiastically in the frenzy of manic violence, committing horrific acts of brutality. And when the IDF went into Gaza, as they had to, to ensure that the Palestinians could never again do this to us, they found a completely weaponized landscape: Tunnels running under and opening into every house, mosque, hospital, and school. A land filled with booby traps making it impossible for us to fight without doing enormous damage to Gaza. And Hamas, who remained hidden in tunnels and in civilian clothing, designed it this way. This is what we were facing. So do not dare look at us and propose that “Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine”. If anything, we wanted it too much. We made offer after offer of peace. We absorbed endless aggression. But we are not going to let ourselves be annihilated to convince you that we want peace. And we will certainly not accept peace on any terms. Some of you demand a one state solution and pretend that two peoples, connected to the same land but with distinct religions, values, cultures, languages and histories, who have never lived in peace, will magically exist in peace and harmony if only they live in one state. And frankly, far too often this call for a one state solution is not naive or delusional but a carefully calculated attempt to rob Jews of their right to self-determination to be a free people in our own land. In this, we are no fools. We have a millennia long history of being persecuted and subjugated by one people after another, and we are not about to give up our one and only state to go back to being at the mercy of others. We do want peace and we are willing to go far to make it happen, but we will not give up our state for it. So now, it is your turn, Palestinians, to answer the question that somehow no university seems to debate – When did you ever truly want peace with the one Jewish state?