Peace Cannot Be Built on Trust Alone
Many Israelis who still believe that compromise with the Palestinians is necessary, no longer trust them. They are not extremists. Many understand that ruling over another people forever is dangerous for Israel morally, politically, and internationally. They know the occupation is not sustainable. But they are afraid.
They ask serious questions: What if the Palestinians do not really want peace? What if Oslo failed because the Palestinians were never sincere? What if every Israeli withdrawal brings rockets, terror, and more demands?
These fears cannot be dismissed. They are rooted in suicide bombings, the Second Intifada, Hamas rule in Gaza, rockets from areas Israel left, and the trauma of October 7. Any serious peace proposal that ignores them will fail before it begins.
But fear cannot be the basis for national strategy. If Israel’s answer to mistrust is permanent control, walls, military raids, settlement expansion, and the denial of any political horizon, Israel is not making itself safer. It is deepening the conditions that guarantee future violence.
The question is not whether Israelis should blindly trust Palestinians. They should not. The question is whether Israel can design a process that does not depend on blind trust. The answer is yes.
The great mistake is to think peace agreements are based on trust. Serious agreements are based on verified obligations, benchmarks, phased implementation, monitoring, consequences for violations, and mechanisms that gradually build trust through performance.
Trust is not the starting point. Trust is the result.
Oslo failed for many reasons. It is too easy, and politically convenient, to say it failed only because the Palestinians were insincere. There were Palestinian violations, incitement, terrorism, corruption, double messages, and failure to build transparent, democratic institutions.
There were also Israeli violations: settlement expansion, land confiscations, restrictions on movement, delays in redeployments, failure to release agreed prisoners, closures, and the constant creation of facts on the ground that convinced Palestinians Israel was not heading toward ending the occupation.
During the Oslo years, both sides violated agreements, found excuses, and became convinced the other was acting in bad faith.
A new peace process must learn from those failures.
First, the endgame must be clear from the beginning. Oslo postponed the most important questions: Palestinian sovereignty, borders, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, and security. That ambiguity allowed each side to imagine a different final outcome.
A new process must state where it is going: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side; Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, with agreed land swaps; robust security arrangements; no armed militias outside the authority of the Palestinian state; a negotiated solution for refugees; Jerusalem as the capital of both peoples; and regional recognition and normalization for Israel.
Second, implementation must be phased and benchmarked. No side should be asked to take irreversible risks based only on promises. Each stage must include obligations by both sides, a timetable, measurable benchmarks, and a pause before moving forward. If obligations are fulfilled, the process advances. If not, it pauses. It should not collapse because of one violation, but it cannot advance while violations are ignored.
Third, there must be trusted third-party monitors and verifiers. Israelis will not trust Palestinian reports. Palestinians will not trust Israeli reports. The United States alone may not be enough. A credible mechanism should include the United States, key Arab states, Europe, and possibly international security professionals accepted by both sides. Their role would be to verify implementation, publish findings, resolve disputes, identify violations, and recommend corrective steps.
Fourth, security must be real, not rhetorical. Israelis need to know that a Palestinian state will not become another armed front. That means demilitarization of heavy weapons, a unified Palestinian security command, no independent armed groups, strong border arrangements, intelligence cooperation, and regional guarantees.
But Palestinians also need security: protection from settler violence, an end to arbitrary military incursions, freedom of movement, economic access, and the dignity of living under their own government rather than under occupation.
Security cannot mean security for one side and insecurity for the other. That is not peace. It is control.
Fifth, both sides must be held accountable. If Palestinian institutions tolerate violence or incitement, there must be consequences. If Israel expands settlements or fails to implement redeployments, there must also be consequences. A peace agreement in which only one side is monitored will not survive. Accountability must be mutual.
Sixth, peace cannot be built only by separation. Walls and fences may reduce immediate risks, and sometimes they may be necessary. But they do not create peace. Peace is built by interaction, cooperation, and the slow human recognition that the other people is not going away and is not destined to be an eternal enemy.
Seventh, education must be part of the agreement, not an afterthought. Israeli children must learn that Palestinians are a people with history, identity, suffering, rights, and legitimate national aspirations.
Palestinian children must learn that Jews and Israelis also have history, trauma, identity, rights, and a legitimate need for security and self-determination. Hebrew and Arabic should become languages of understanding.
None of this is naïve. Naïveté is believing the conflict can be managed forever. Naïveté is believing force alone will make millions of Palestinians accept life without freedom. Naïveté is believing Israelis can have security while Palestinians live in despair. Naïveté is also believing Palestinians can achieve freedom by denying Israeli fears or Jewish historical attachment to this land.
A serious peace process must begin with honesty: Israelis do not trust Palestinians, and Palestinians do not trust Israelis. That reality is not a reason to avoid negotiations. It is the reason negotiations must be designed intelligently.
Peace does not require love. It does not require forgetting. It requires interests, obligations, verification, accountability, courage, and leadership.
Israelis who fear Palestinian intentions should not be asked to close their eyes and jump. They should be offered a process in which every step is tested, verified, and reversible until trust is earned.
Palestinians who fear Israeli domination should be offered the same: a process in which occupation ends, sovereignty is real, and Israeli obligations are monitored no less than Palestinian ones.
The alternative is not safety. The alternative is more war, more bereavement, more international isolation, more extremism, and more generations taught that the other side understands only force.
We do not need a naïve peace. We need an intelligent peace – one that begins with mistrust, builds mechanisms to overcome it, and proves through action that both peoples can be safer, freer, and more secure together than they will ever be apart.
While all the points Gershon makes seem valid, I suspect ( and feel personally) that taken all together, it feels hopelessly complicated and like a vehicle with multiple moving parts which must somehow fit together and then actually function, prone to breakdown at any time. But maybe if some SUPER BRIGHT LIGHTS like the authors of The Future is Peace (Israeli Maoz Inon and Palestinian Amin Abu Sarah) are able to blond people (temporarily) to the insanity of eternal war and get even a glimpse of the coherence of peace and cooperation, then those parts might just come together & we can move forward. Then maybe some day Israel-Palestine will become model for the world. Selah🙏❤️🌏
This argument sounds reasonable because it speaks the language of fear, verification, benchmarks, and mutual mistrust. But beneath that language lies the old Israeli demand: Palestinians must first make their occupier feel safe before they are allowed to be free.
That is not peace. It is domination with a procedural vocabulary.
Israeli fear is real, but it has been transformed into a political weapon. It is used to excuse occupation, siege, settlement expansion, home demolitions, mass imprisonment, military raids, land theft, apartheid roads, settler violence, and the permanent denial of Palestinian sovereignty. Palestinians are not being asked to compromise with an equal neighbour. They are being asked to negotiate the terms of their own subordination with the state that controls their land, borders, airspace, water, movement, economy, population registry, and future.
The central problem is not a lack of Israeli trust. The central problem is Israeli power without accountability.
For decades, Israel has presented itself as the cautious party, the wounded party, the party waiting for proof of Palestinian sincerity. Yet during the same decades it colonised the West Bank, entrenched a regime of separation, fragmented Palestinian territory, strangled Gaza, annexed Jerusalem in practice, empowered settlers, and converted temporary occupation into a permanent system of rule. This was not an accident, nor merely a failure of Oslo. It was policy.
To say that “both sides violated Oslo” may be formally true, but it obscures the decisive fact: one side violated an agreement while living under occupation, the other violated it while expanding the occupation. One side lacked sovereignty, the other used sovereignty, law, bureaucracy, capital, and force to prevent sovereignty from ever arriving.
That asymmetry cannot be hidden behind the language of “mutual accountability”. There can be no moral equivalence between an occupied people resisting dispossession and a state that has made dispossession its governing architecture. Palestinian violence can be condemned. Palestinian political failures can be criticised. Palestinian leadership can, and should, be held accountable. But none of that changes the foundational reality: Israel is the occupying power, the colonising power, and the party that has repeatedly chosen land over peace.
The demand that Palestinians prove they are safe enough to deserve freedom is obscene. No people’s rights are conditional on the emotional reassurance of their occupier. Freedom is not a prize awarded for good behaviour. Sovereignty is not a favour granted by the stronger party. Self-determination is not something Palestinians must earn by satisfying every Israeli anxiety.
An intelligent peace process cannot begin from Israeli fear. It must begin from Israeli responsibility. The occupation must end. Settlements must be dismantled. Gaza must be freed from siege. East Jerusalem must not be treated as conquered property. Palestinian political life must no longer be policed, engineered, fragmented, or vetoed by Israel. Security arrangements may be necessary, but they cannot function as a permanent Israeli licence to dominate Palestinian land and life.
Israel does not need another process that manages the consequences of its own violence. It needs to be confronted with the cost of maintaining a regime of supremacy. The international community does not need more choreography, more envoys, more “confidence-building measures”, and more technical language that allows colonisation to continue under diplomatic cover. It needs enforcement, sanctions, legal accountability, and a clear refusal to treat permanent occupation as a security concern rather than as a crime.
Trust is not the starting point, that much is true. But neither is Israeli fear. The starting point is law. The starting point is equality. The starting point is the recognition that Palestinians are not a demographic problem, a security threat, or a population to be administered, but a people with an inalienable right to freedom.
There will be no peace while Israel insists on being both occupier and victim, both jailer and judge, both coloniser and party waiting to be reassured. The choice is not between Israeli security and Palestinian freedom. The choice is between decolonisation and permanent war. Israel can end domination, or it can continue to produce the violence it claims only to fear.