Einat Wilf was a left-wing Israeli and peace activist who once thought the Palestinian Authority could be a “partner for peace,” but has now awakened. More on Einat Wilf can be found here: “Dr. Einat Wilf: ‘We lied to ourselves about the Palestinians,'” by Sherry Makover-Balikov, Jerusalem Post, December 13, 2025:
Not everyone identified with these ideas. Until October 7 many saw them as marginal.
“A few weeks before the massacre, I sat on a panel… a very senior left-wing journalist said to me, Einat, who cares about the Palestinians today, it is so passé.”
“It was a closing remark, but it reflected a mindset. We had the Abraham Accords, and Hamas was supposedly deterred. Even Bennett said Palestinians are a splinter in the backside. I took my book The War of Return to security officials and ministers. I said our enemies, especially the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, still seek a reality where Jews have no state.”
“We also dealt with the billions for Gaza… pouring money would not buy quiet because Gazans believe Gaza is a base to ‘liberate Palestine.’ We wrote that transferring billions to the Palestinians will not end well.”…
Israel did nothing to prevent Qatar from pouring money into Gaza, thinking that poverty, not faith, was what prompted the Gazans’ murderous hatred of “the Jews.” That misunderstanding is also what caused the Israelis to allow twenty thousand Gazans into their country before October 7, 2023, providing them with employment, at wages three to four times what they could earn in Gaza, and that, it was felt, would mollify them and lessen their hatred of Israel. Instead, some of those guest-workers provided information to Hamas on Israel’s military bases and troop emplacements.
Wilf’s party proposes answers to security, policy, and public issues. The first is to advance peace based on Arab and Palestinian acceptance of Zionism.
Yes, and where is the slightest evidence of “Arab and Palestinian acceptance of Zionism? By that, I mean real acceptance of a permanent Jewish state from the river to the sea — the original borders set by the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine in 1922? There has been no such acceptance. The present and future members of the Abraham Accords will accept a Jewish state only if it agrees to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, which would leave Israel stripped of its necessary defenses in the Jordan Valley. It’s not a deal that Israel can ever accept.
“Leadership striving for peace, and understanding that peace and security are impossible while the Palestinian ideology that negates Zionism persists.”
How can you strive for peace opposite an ideology that denies the Jewish people’s existence in its land?
“The Palestinians are not ready for peace or any arrangement that includes a Jewish state. Still, Israel must say it strives for peace under conditions, not ‘no’ to every initiative. The Saudi crown prince said he would advance the Abraham Accords if a path to two states opens, and Israel said, ‘we do not agree.’”
“If we were wiser, we would say, excellent. The path to peace is between two states, Jewish and Palestinian. For a hundred years, the Palestinians have said they are not ready for a neighboring Jewish state. The day they want to live beside us, not on our ruins, they will find we were never the problem.”…
Alas, for all of her improved understanding about the Palestinian views of Israel, and her desire to disabuse them of the idea that Israel can be defeated, she nonetheless still talks about a “two-state solution,” which, in squeezing Israel back within the 1949 lines, would not sate, but whet, Arab appetites for more concessions from Israel, Meanwhile a surrendered Judea and Samaria, now incorporated into a Palestinian state, would turn that territory into another Gaza, with Hamas operatives heartened by the IDF’s retreat, and better able to keep up the fight against the hated Zionists.
But as long as the Palestinians are Muslims, they will never be “ready to accept a permanent Jewish state” anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” In their view, any land once possessed by Muslims must by right always belong to them. It is this that Einat Wilf refuses to believe; she still holds out hope for “two states living side by side in peace and security.” Netanyahu has it right: the future should be a Jewish state, sovereign over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but with enclaves where Palestinians will live, as Netanyahu has repeatedly said, with “all of the power to govern themselves and none of the power to hurt us.”
࿗Infidel࿘ says
This is the problem w/ too many Israelis. None of them connect the actions of Hamas, Fatah, Turkey, Qatar, et al w/ islam. They narrow it down to those entities, and pretend that countries like Egypt and Jordan are allies. After the Bondi Beach shooting, they’re busy investigating Iran, not realizing that most Pakistanis have the same attitude towards Jews that they have towards Hindus, Sikhs or Christians.
After that, they treat the rare exceptions as rules: just b’cos countries like Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan have diplomatic relations w/ them, they think that the problem is not in islam but in something else. Never mind that those ex Soviet -stans cracked down on islam for about a century, so what is there now is pretty bawlderized. Also, the Jadid philosophy, which governs muslims in both the -stans and in Russia, is not practiced anywhere outside that region
Israelis, make allies w/ other people who are completely aware about the evils of islam, and don’t just dismiss them just b’cos you want to look tolerant. You can tolerate all other religions in your country – Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism,….
islam doesn’t have to be one of them
Jeremy says
I disagree with you Robert. I think she understands the reality of the situation but hopes there is a solution on behalf of the Palestinians and if course the Jews. Yes she thought at one time it was about land but admits way before October 7th it’s about Palestinianism and the rejection of the Jewish state. Perhaps you can see the future better than she but I don’t think her romanticism about a two state solution is because she doesn’t understand what is happening in the Middle East and the racist ideology of Islam.
Condojamie says
To me she is an idiot.
Edmund Carey says
Einat Wilf is the co-author (with somebody named Adi Schwartz) of an enlightening book on the Israel/Palestine impasse called The War of Return. I thought it an excellent study of the irremoveability (as I will call it) of the Palestinian obsession with a “right of return”, which is described as the premier obstruction to a final status agreement between the two peoples.
My impression was that Ms. Wilf had moved beyond her earlier position by the time she co-wrote that. (The book is five years old.) She certainly didn’t sound like any naïve innocent. I didn’t know anything about her, though, at the time. The two authors announce themselves to be Israeli leftists who received a shock from Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the chance for a country for his people back in 2000.
I’d still recommend the book, whatever else needs to be acknowledged about her.