A large demonstration was planned for this evening by the Israeli peace camp in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Today the police cancelled it in accord with the directive of the Homefront Command against the assembly of more than 1,000 people in areas including Tel Aviv because of the danger of rocket attacks from Gaza. The organizing groups (the Meretz and Hadash parties, Peace Now, Combatants for Peace, The Forum of Peace Organizations, The Young Guard in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Another Voice, and the Parents Circle Families Forum) decided to postpone the demonstration. But activists called on social media to come to the square anyway, without the stage and the speeches, but with the call: “We’re changing direction to peace: not to war, but a political solution.”

Among the slogans that will probably still be shown and shouted in the square tonight, as at so many demonstrations before, such as the one in the same place last week, is the seemingly banal statement” “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” The slogan is most often seen on the posters of the Hadash party, but everyone joins in, and others have adopted it too. It sounds like a naïve statement, as if merely repeating it will stop the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs. It seems to fly in the face of the reality of the conflict, the spiral of violence, the unwillingness to compromise, the distrust and fear. It also appears to contradict another slogan of the Israeli peace movement, often attributed to Yitzhak Rabin, that “you make peace with your enemies.” Do those who chant and display this slogan really think that the Israeli government and the Palestinian delegation, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, can find a way to restart and extend the ceasefire into a broader agreement by waving a magic wand that ends the entrenched enmity?

The slogan “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies” is neither unrealistic nor naïve. It is rather a radical, if not revolutionary statement. It does not deny the reality of the conflict, but refuses to accept the ethno-national-religious grounds on which the conflict is conducted. It speaks an ethical imperative, for (Israeli) Jews and (Palestinian) Arabs to refuse to be mobilized as Jews and Arabs in this war or any other war. It refuses the seeming naturalness of the belief that “well, I’m an Arab, and you are Jew, so I hate you, because you want to kill me,” and vice versa. It rejects the imperative to impose ethno-national and masculinist identities on ourselves and our bodies, instead of putting people before flags.

The slogan calls instead, implicitly, for Jews and Arabs to recognize themselves according to other, intertwining identities – as citizens, as humans, as Middle Easterners, as people of Abrahamic faith. The slogan refers, indirectly, to the civil society of Jews and Arabs that existed in Mandate Palestine until 1947-48. It was a civil society that could, with difficulty, have survived the 1947-8 partition process, had the network of Arab-Jewish relationships documented in the film Civil Alliance directed by Ariella Azoulay been sustained. The slogan is practiced daily by joint Israeli-Palestinian peace activists in groups such as Combatants for Peace, Parents Circle Families Forum, Ta’ayush and the Hadash party. The slogan refuses enmity and embraces peace by radically changing the terms, identities, loyalties and affiliations of war. The slogan at once calls out in the identities of Jews and Arabs, and puts them aside. Instead of Jews against Arabs, Jews or Arabs, it chooses and. Jews and Arabs.

Update: several hundred did demonstrate in Rabin Square on the evening of August 9th