The Appeasement Camp is Finished

Many observers still refer to them as the left camp or the pro-peace camp, yet those descriptions obscure the actual history of who produced lasting agreements with Israel’s neighbors. Menachem Begin, a figure of the right, negotiated the peace treaty with Egypt, and Benjamin Netanyahu, likewise from the right, advanced the Abraham Accords. The group that insisted on calling itself the peace camp spent decades pressing Israel to relinquish land, abandon hard-won military positions, and accept heightened risks to security on the theory that such gestures would persuade enemies to choose coexistence. They repeatedly portrayed the right as the main obstacle to peace, though the charge described their own results more closely than it described anyone else’s.

Their consistent demand that Israel surrender territory and restrain its defenses produced the conditions that led to the second intifada and later to the massacre of October 7. The strategy of repeated concessions failed by every practical measure. It cost Israeli lives and left the country less secure than it would have been had those policies never been tried.

A Palestinian state will not be established, and a two-state arrangement lies outside any realistic future. Peace becomes possible only after the Palestinian national movement accepts defeat and abandons its refusal to tolerate Jewish sovereignty on any part of the land. Israel will not transfer territory that belongs to the Jewish people merely because an enemy failed to eliminate us by force.

Those who genuinely want an end to the conflict will have to make their peace with Israel’s permanent presence rather than continue waiting for further Israeli retreats.